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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat to fund Mozilla and Sendmail? 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the isn't-that-interesting dept.
aeiler writes "According to this PC Week article. Red Hat is looking to invest significant cash, engineering and marketing resources into the Mozilla project and Sendmail. "
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Red Hat to fund Mozilla and Sendmail? More

Red Hat to fund Mozilla and Sendmail?

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  • Good, it's about time someone with significant resources has decided to back the Mozilla project! If the next Milestone is as much of an improvement over M11 as M11 was over M10, we might actually have a usable browser!

    Let's just hope that RH doesn't try to make the browser too biased toward their distribution.

  • With a market cap. of now nearly 17(!) billion (twice as much as one month ago), their shares having risen today by 16% to $247, they can afford it... (although RH still only gets $14/share...).

  • A Proof Point (Score:4)

    by Ryandav ( 5475 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:32AM (#1495963) Homepage Journal
    Something to point to when reactionary idiots say uninformed things like how Redhat is like Microsoft:

    RedHat funds other people to develop technology, and makes it available to everyone.
    Microsoft buys out competing technology or intimidates it out of the market until they have their own implementation.

    Way to go Redhat.

  • An investment in Mozilla would help Red Hat on the desktop, where Linux has yet to significantly penetrate

    Best news I've read in ages. There's no doubt that the browser is Linux's biggest weakness on the desktop at the moment, and an open source browser would go a long way to convincing many that Linux is a viable option to MS.

    As for the inevitable anti-RH diatribes: pah! I say to you all. Red Hat has acted with honour on all occasions, and I'll continue to be a fan as long as they continue to do such great stuff for Linux, for Open Source and for Red Hat.

  • This makes perfect sense, Red Hat seems to be positioning itself to be a major player in the hightech industry, not just the 'Alternative OS' market. Rumour has it they may be getting ready to purchase Corel as well. With Mozilla to provide a browser platform, and Corel Wordperfect Office suite to provide an office environment, they would be well placed to deal competitively with Microsoft (although they will have a long uphill climb in that battle). Looks like they have decided to leverage all that money they collected from their IPO to place themselves in direct competition to the big boys.

    I would expect to see them purchase a few more companies to round out there holdings and widen their market.

  • Real monsters (Score:5)

    by Oestergaard ( 3005 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:36AM (#1495966) Homepage
    >> My mother said there aren't real monsters. But there are - Newt, Aliens II

    Unfortunately both mozilla and sendmail are monsters. It is going to take a lot of effort to make sendmail a lean and mean mailer, and I don't see why anyone would care to even try. Postfix is out there, which has the features of sendmail (almost) and is already lean and mean. Of course, postfix is not a big name yet, like sendmail, and they're already sponsored. I think sponsoring sendmail is nothing but a political decision. It really gets us nowhere we can't go already.

    Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?). Those seem to be much more clean by design, and actually sponsoring them could well give us a browser that was both lean and mean, and had the features we hope to get in a usable and stable manner from the Mozilla effort.

    Although it hurts, sometimes it's best to let die what cannot live. I don't see a point in funding sendmail. I'm not so sure about mozilla, but with my impressions of it, I'd say there are better designs out there which are already posing nice features worthy of sponsorship.

    What do you think ? Is sponsoring old monsters really the way to go ? IMHO it's not.
  • OK, I'll try not to get TOO nervous about Red Hat vying for world domination. I'll repeat to myself: They are good members of the Open Source Community. They are _good_ members of the Open Source Community. They _are_ good...

    But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it? Just speculation...
  • but the real boost will be from the engineering, and especially marketing. It took Linux as a whole quite some time to reach the critical mass that is needed to succeed in the marketplace. With some funding in these important projects, it will help to fight the marketing muscle that M$ currently is using to bosst it's proprietary alternatives.

    Nice to see all around from Redhat.

  • Cool, but why Sendmail? (Score:4)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:38AM (#1495970) Homepage
    I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding... also, quite established. I think it'd be cool to see some investment in Qmail (www.qmail.org) or PostFix (www.postfix.org) which are touted as more secure options...

    Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser! :)
    ----
  • What happened to the old "we only do free software" RedHat? Aren't there some new free [speech] browser projects that are more worthy of their cash than Mozilla? Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.
  • Mozilla is only useful is you happen to have an IP address. Sendmail is also in the same boat. Why not develop something that could enhance the human condition? Something like AI or a program that can do extremely complex voice association. Maybe something that will have a small set of system resources? Networks and connections of the like that one would use sendmail for are usually bad for several reasons.

    1. Failure. If connections on the network go down then you are screwed.

    2. Expensive- not many people have money equivelent to that of small African countries and usually cannot afford the ability to do all the fancy stuff. Having a permanent connection is difficult.

    3. Unnecessary- it is far better to have something on a machine you can control versus something you cannot.
  • Actually it hasn't fallen yet my friend.
  • (Do I get first post?)

    I am really glad that RedHat is going to invest a lot of effort in Mozilla. I think that Microsoft were very wise when they realised how important the browser is. I think it is key to being a successful OS. I am glad that RedHat will work to make Mozilla successful. I think that the success of Mozilla (or some other browser) is very important if Linux is going to succeed in the desktop market.
  • Maybe, if RHAT makes a RedHat branded Mozilla broswer, this will show, once and for all, that Mozilla != Netscape. Mozilla is not even the same codebase as the Navigator series of browsers. Maybe RH will invest in some integration of the Mozilla HTML/XML libraries into Gnome (via a wrapper or some such). Fun fun fun!
  • No it just helps out the elite of the world who already have a strangle hold on us anyway. I couldn't think of a worse thing than to empower people with treasures they are not prepared to use or use properly.
  • If the last moves by RH (Cygnus, Mozilla) mean that RH is focusing on the desktop --which is Linux's weak point-- doesn't that mean that they're might be an opening for someone else to tackle the server market?

    And since, that's where Linux's current strengths lie (cheap server boxes), doesnt that leave a window for RH's rivals to catch up? (I am thinking TurboLinux)...

    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

  • I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding

    And Netscape isn't? I agree that the money would be better spent on something other than Sendmail, but your position is extremely mixed to advocate Mozilla- another corporate product- and not Sendmail.

    Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser! :)

    No, we need choice. Mozilla has funding, I'd be interested in seeing the money spent a bit more wisely.

  • Just wondering, does everybody use Sendmail?

    We use qmail [qmail.org], and we've been very pleased with the results.

    Are there reasons why people would use Sendmail over qmail? Are there reasons why people would use qmail over Sendmail?

    Just interested :>

    Thanks.
  • Hey, when you have a substandard product, you need all the marketing you can get.
  • Redhat targets two different competitors: Microsoft and the KDE camp. With a working browser they can hit hard not only Microsoft's Internet Explorer ever-growing desktop dominance but also the fast-pacing browser component from KDE called Konqueror. Thus they diferentiate themselves against both types of competition (dominant player and fast-moving pretender). The Sendmail affair is helping Red Hat convince corporations their consulting is broad, not only RedHat Linux itself but also critical corporate applications like e-mail. To me, Redhat marketing plan is A grade until now.

  • Don't give up on Mozilla so easily. It a completely new beast, no old code whatsoever.

    You can have your KDE browser (I'm sure it will be good), but you need Mozilla to keep IE in check. Even if you use Linux, you should be worrying about IE.

    narbey

  • Good news for a change (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, just like the subject sais. Good news.
    No, not that sendmail and mozilla are supported by RH (which is also good) but that money is channeld back to the open source community that is essentially the source of the product RH sells.
    The majority of open source programmers would and will contribute source without payment but it is always nice to have ones work acknowleged.

    I wonder how exactly do they plan to do that?
    Or did I miss something in that article?

    Ciao, Peter (Who really hopes this to be his last post as AC)

  • Re:Why Sendmail? (Score:3)

    by proberts ( 9821 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:57AM (#1495986) Homepage
    Lots of people use Sendmail. It's the default MTA for most *nixes. Personally, I prefer postfix:


    www.postfix.org [postfix.org]


    It's mostly sendmail compatible, faster than most other MTAs, easy to configure, designed to be secure, and doesn't have the interaction problems that qmail sometimes does with other software. Sendmail is still the most flexible MTA on the planet, and for some people running legacy system gateways, there isn't a good alternative.

    It's also easy for vendors to add sendmail (or postfix) to their OS distributions, qmail's license isn't favorable to 3rd parties.

    Sendmail is the best "lowest common denominator" MTA. Postfix's sendmail compatibility program attempts to provide the base functionality necessary for _most_ external programs to work. Qmail doesn't even pretend to try to be sendmail compatible. Some people think that's an advantage, others don't. Because sendmail is monolithic, it can do things easily that modular mailers like qmail and postfix can't.

    Paul
  • Well they really don't because network centric technology is only good if you really need said network. Few people actually "need" such access in the course of their daily lives.

  • I find Exim [exim.org] to be an excellent MTA. It is easy to set up, yet very powerful, and it works like a dream.

    Sendmail is just a large, crufty piece of software with a lot of security holes. I know that a lot of time has been spent on it to fix these problems, but I think Red Hats money would be better spent on further developing the other MTAs out there which are better, such as Exim and qmail.

    Still, any investment is better than no investment I suppose. I just dread to think what Red Hat is going to do with the results, are they going to be 'Red Hat-ised'?

  • I have to agree with some of the other postings here. Why sendmail? It's high profile, that I understand, but it's a huge dinosaur with plenty of legacy code and various issues too numerous to mention. There are modern mailers like postfix and exim, which are both GPLed, and provide a fast, stable alternative. I also like qmail, but it has a weird license which makes modifications a little difficult (author has to approve all of them, which could take a millenia if RedHat puts its people behind it.)
  • Exactly how is red hat broken? I haven't had the time or the HD space to play with it. Seems that if people are investing in it it can't be too bad. Can it? Why would a company risk their reputation on something that has a bad time working correctly? And this comes from an operating system that is already a minority in the OS market and one that touts stability? If this is the case they could give linux a bad name.
  • Actually, there are already plans to turn Mozilla into a Bonobo component, which means a web browser could be easily embedded in any application.

    --
    Jeremy Katz
  • No.

    Secondly I think that it can't be the browser that makes a OS good. If I have an OS that does nothing but insult the user with random insults and BSOD's every 3 minutes but has a great browser that has built in AI can make or break the OS in terms of customer favor.

  • The inverse of Brook's Law is not true (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @09:10AM (#1495994) Homepage Journal
    One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it...

    Very true, but on the other hand, a lack of cash and developers will not make a project succeed. If there are those would like to work on Mozilla full time, but need a job to feed their families, maybe this will enable them to do both.
  • I think diversity and competition ar the greatest strengths in the Linux market. That this move by Red Hat does not close the door for competitors is just that much more reason to admire them for it. Their funding of these projects doesn't keep them from being used with competing distributions. And helping Sendmail certainly doesn't look like they've forgotten about servers. I wish them success, but not so much that competing products can't challenge them.

    --
    Peace,
    vilvoy
  • Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?).

    That would be very hard to do. Konqueror uses QT's signals and slots to do a lot of stuff. GTK doesn't have that, although it may be able to do it with libsig++. Why would it need to be ported to GTK, anyway? QT is not evil.
  • I agree w/ not supporting sendmail. What a piece of junk. Why anyone would want to sponsor it is beyond me. IMO, sendmail represents some of the WORST parts of unix -- difficult configuration, poor design. As for Postfix, I think it has some sort of strange license which might disqualify it as being considered 'free' software.

    Instead of sendmail, they should sponsor KDE or Gnome (or both!) or how about a project to modernize printing on Unix.

  • Re:Real monsters (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "but with my impressions of it"
    That is kind of key to your evaluation of Mozilla. Mozilla is not monster code. Netscape was. It did not compile. It had big pieces missing. Abandoning lots of bloated old code, mostly starting from scratch, etc., then emerging with a small, compliant browser with 90+% common code base across platforms is not bad. It is not a quick process but it is resulting in a great new browser that promises to be able to set the tone for the future. I develop web sites for a living. The developing PHP on Linux with Postgres backend part is easy on Linux, but not the web page testing part. There is a lot of pressure to use windows if I don't have a browser that is more compliant than IE. I am happy with both what they are doing and the Mozilla team's progress. The web will not become friendlier for open standards because of Konqueror (not in the near or medium term anyway). IE needs competition on Windows!!
  • Since when is Mozilla not free software?
  • The browser isn't Linux's most glaring weakness on the desktop at the moment. Try MS Office. Star Office doesn't stack up to it. How about a quick and dirty database, such as Access or Filemaker Pro? For SOHO and home users, where's Quicken and Quickbooks?

    Until there's many more web apps than are available currently, as well as more fully featured apps, the browser is no where near 1st as far as getting Linux accepted on the desktop.

  • Fewer strings than from AOL, I hope (Score:3)

    by EisPick ( 29965 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @09:17AM (#1496001)
    It's great to see Mozilla acquire a new "senior partner" in addition to AOL.

    When you look at the "improvements" to Communicator 4.x since AOL's acquisition of Netscape, you get the notion that AOL's only interest in the browser has been to market their "branded" service. Have you noticed there's no way to opt out of AIM in the 4.7 install (for Windows, at least)?

    Yeah, I know, AOL/Netscape has eleventy-one developers dedicated to Mozilla, and if it weren't for them there'd be no Mozilla. But given their business model, it's hard to see how AOL will be able to justify that level of effort long term -- other than for adding bogus "enhancements" designed to herd sheep into their $23/month service.

    Red Hat's business model is based on building a strong base of Open-Source apps, so it's easier for me to see them keeping Mozilla alive and relevant for the long term.

    Let's hope it's not too late.

  • The starting homepage? Easy enough to change just go into the options and change it to
    http://www.debian.org *grin*

    Just comment that portion of the code out and recompile.

    Just ignore the logo. You might even be able to change. You can change the bios image on your computer to be something linux tux.

    See above

    Ok a little bulky but with the trends being that people buy new computers why should this matter. I have brought this to the attention of the readership many, many, many time about themes of backwards compatability and the need to keep old hardware truely alive but no one seems to care. Seems that people cry wolf when even their high end mainframes are suffering? Is that it?

  • well, not really (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    MS does this sort of thing all the time, just not usually with open source projects. That doesn't make them nice. For that matter, MS funds open source perl development on Windows.
  • There's no point in marketing a product that isn't marketable (yet).

    How about getting Mozilla to work without the constant lockups? There seem to be a lot of "features" that completely crash it at this point.

    Just as Windows is claimed to have lowered peoples expectations for stability in their OS's, Mozilla could suceed at lowering expectations in terms of software reliablity if it were heavily pushed on the public right now.
  • you could just choose to delete the instant messenger
  • Hey slashdot-terminal, we wrestled earlier over pointless trivialities, why not continue? :)

    Your posts to this thread all seem to center around the same idea, which seems to be "what use is all this network stuff?" (please correct me if i've missed the point)

    1. Failure. If connections on the network go down then you are screwed.

    The same argument applies to your power line, your phone line, your physical computer hardware, your water pipes, your gas line... Redundant connections solve this problem for those with gobs of $$, I personally deal with it by reading a book :)

    2. Expensive- not many people have money equivelent to that of small African countries and
    usually cannot afford the ability to do all the fancy stuff. Having a permanent connection is difficult.

    As someone patiently (*patiently* i swear) waiting for ADSL or Cable connectivity, I can agree with you somewhat on this one. The Good Thing (tm) in my eyes, however, is that these technologies (and others) are becoming more and more prevalent for less and less money. In other words, they're becoming more accessable for your average Joe all the time. As always-on high-speed (maybe even wireless?) connectivity becomes more integrated into our daily lives, we'll (imho) really start to weigh in the benefits of this Information Age we're careening headlong into.

    3. Unnecessary- it is far better to have something on a machine you can control versus something you cannot.

    That's the one that prompted this whole reply :)

    The way you termed it, I agree. I think you were really trying to say that it's better to store information locally than remotely. I *seriously* disagree with that proposition. Sometimes it's much better to store your data remotely, as it allows you to access said data from any network conected point. This enabling of one to many (and many to one, and many to many, and one to one, for that matter) is what makes networking really worth it. Look at slashdot if you need proof...

    Anthony
    ^X^X
    Segmentation fault (core dumped)
  • You were making sense up until #6, 7 and 8.

    Everyone loves to hate Corel, forgetting that they've delivered the best Word Processor available for Linux (GUIed, i mean).

    I don't even think that Corel is buyable at this point, unless they WANT to be aquired. They do have a poison pill, which prevented Adobe from seriously considering purchasing them a few years back.

    And lastly, Red Hat buying Sun???? Hello? We're on Planet EARTH... Redhat's not buying Sun, today tomorrow or 5 years from now. I'd hate to see that occur, and i can't imagine how anyone could think that would be beneficial to anybody, anywhere. I won't rant, though :)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The common thread between Sendmail, Mozilla, and even Cygnus, is that they all work with Windows.

    The rationale goes like this; if you want to take over the desktop, you have to go about it in stages. First you get people used to the new tools they will need: the Cygnus port of the unix shell tools, the Netscape browser, the Apache server, the Sendmail server, etc. Then you point out how close they are to being able to change platforms altogether, and how much better their favorite tools run under Linux.

    Anyway, the MPL is completely free, and the NPL is only unfree to the extent required for Navigator to continue to exist while Mozilla evolves.

    I don't think Netscape were holding back, they just somewhat realistically realized that killing off Navigator to get Mozilla would be sort of stupid. The situation that Mozilla was in was similar to that of BSD when it was first released. They were still dependent on proprietary code for parts of the product.

    The problem with the MPL isn't that it is not free, rather that some corporations refuse to contribute to it because it isn't as well understood as the GPL, and the cross licensing of patents is scary for a big company.

  • Is Mozilla GPLed, does it matter?

  • Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.

    Mozilla is distributed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and/or the Netscape Public License (NPL), which even Richard Stallman says are free software [gnu.org].

    (Of course, RMS prefers that you use the GPL instead of the NPL/MPL, but they are free licenses.)

  • Mozilla is lean (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe should do some research before posting... One of the key points of the Mozilla overhaul that people keep whining about because it took so long was to produce a browser that provides all the major web browsing features, mailer, etc. yet fits on a single floppy and uses minimal RAM. The KDE browser is years behind and far fewer people with any web browser design experience on the project. Not to mention the fact that it's got far less support from developers and almost no press.
  • Just look at Red Hat's stock price today ($250 a share!!) It's no wonder they can afford to spend as much as they want.

  • I think that I was one of the many skeptics that were around when I found out that Red Hat was going public. As many people thought (my self being one of them), there was a genuine fear that Red Hat was in it purely for the sake of making LOTS of money. I think that Red Hat is making some good moves that are very true to the heart of the Open Source / Free Software movement. While simply throwing money at a problem / issue is not always the solution, I think that Red Hat is doing more than just that. They are not only providing monetary incentives for people to program in OSS projects, but they are spawning more resources. As one of the earlier posts mentioned, as long as they don't make it "Red Hat centric" I think that the benefit of having Red Hat on the side of the OSS/FS could be astronomical. There is definately some potential there. This is a move that I see as very encouraging. It also shows me that Red Hat is not out there to assimilate the market place, but to make it better.
    ----------------------------------------- ---
  • I can't believe this was moderated up... Think about what you're saying: As if the people backing the Mozilla project so far were poor -- Hello? It's AOL. They've got about as much money as you could hope for, without being Microsoft. I don't think Mozilla was hurting in the money department.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Well I am so glad you find my dissertation length posts intriguing!

    The same argument applies to your power line, your phone line, your physical computer hardware, your water pipes, your gas line... Redundant connections solve this problem for those with gobs of $$, I personally deal with it by
    reading a book :)

    Well I think that can be said of even life itself however I have had massive problems with networks in the past. If we measured the ammount of reliability of various services we would see that networks are far less reliable than say water or even electricity.

    As someone patiently (*patiently* i swear) waiting for ADSL or Cable connectivity, I can agree with you somewhat on this one. The Good Thing (tm) in my eyes, however, is that these technologies (and others) are becoming more
    and more prevalent for less and less money. In other words, they're becoming more accessable for your average Joe all the time. As always-on high-speed (maybe even wireless?) connectivity becomes more integrated into our daily
    lives, we'll (imho) really start to weigh in the benefits of this Information Age we're careening headlong into.

    I spend several hours a day on the net connecting via wireless would put me into debtor's prison in no time. Until connections are quite cheap (say maybe the cost of caller id or maybe abotu ~$5/month ) I won't be running to their doors.

    That's the one that prompted this whole reply :)

    The way you termed it, I agree. I think you were really trying to say that it's better to store information locally than remotely. I *seriously* disagree with that proposition. Sometimes it's much better to store your data remotely, as it
    allows you to access said data from any network conected point. This enabling of one to many (and many to one, and many to many, and one to one, for that matter) is what makes networking really worth it. Look at slashdot if you
    need proof...

    Storing information remotely requires a large ammount of money. Suppose you were to price various web hosting services and such for the cost of all your personal games/music/term papers/books /etc and put all of it on the web? I don't know of many services that allow for 3 Tb worth of data to be put online do you? I have had personal experience with slashdot not being avaible or timely or even speedy for quite a while. I have to log in twice to post articles to any discussion because there is something wrong with the site's recognition of my login or perhaps my browser (Netscape Communicator 4.5) I have had my files deleated from various accounts. Had shell access suddenly dissapear because the service decided to be anal with their customers. In short networking is for the aristocrats. For example what happens if I want to connect to the internet at 300bps or lower? Why can't the modem at the ISP simply take the connection and allow me to give up some of the possible 53kps to allow me to connect? If they get paid the same what do they care? I know of no real ISP that would do this for anyone.
  • But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?

    From the article:

    "We were at a certain phase [early this year] where more people working on the project wouldn't have meant more progress," said Mitchell Baker, chief lizard wrangler for Mozilla, in Mountain View, Calif. "Now ... we're at a place where the number of developers who can effectively participate" can grow, Baker said.

    So it seems like the time is ripe for some extra help, especially dedicated (i.e. full-time) help like the kind RedHat can hopefully provide.
    ----------


  • What the fuck good are computers anyways? They are prone to failures, expensive, and wholly unnecessary. Why the fuck are they developing anything for computers? Whats the point with that?

    Why not develope some new flavours of beer instead. Computers are just bad anyways.

    Are you seriously arguing that they ought not develop network apps because networks sometimes fail are too expensive for some? Is this a joke that I didn't get? Have you checked your perscriptions?


    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • i love linux, don't get me wrong, but it has a LONG way to go before it can displace Sun or any other big UNIX vendor.

    MS is a much easier target because its software and OS is so buggy and bloated and crappy...but Sun??

    call me when linux can give me the same performance as Solaris on my 64 cpu E10k's.
  • Well there's nothing that restricts the Sendmail people from ripping out all that "legacy code" and reworking Sendmail in the next version (or the next couple of versions). The only thing stopping them is the amount of effort it would take. With an investment from RedHat, that effort becomes a little easier to fund.

    Having said that, I think RedHat probably could have found a more worthwhile project to shell out cash to. Oh well, it's their money, not mine :-)

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Indeed

    Any 5gl would be a good thing. Visual Basic, Fox Pro and the like are all valuable tools. And a good IDE would be nice (actualy Ill settle for something that dose syntax highlighting etc. for php).

    But the SOHO market is a big one.. Novell is to this day fighting (not very well IMNSHO) the immage of Netware 3.x and its administratiblity.. NW 4.x and 5 are far easier to administrator than NT, but yet MS continues wins in the non fortune 500 market.

    Novell is failing because they have a marketing department slightly less competent than that of Commodore's, not because they dont have the tools. So far, linux dosent quite have the tools, but it has the brand recognition... In the long run it will be a bad thing to have linux in the hands of 'normal people' before it is ready.. Thell get frustrated and leave, never to return (like all those people who once had NW3.x boxes and diddnt upgrade once they got win95 file and print shares).

  • I've asked RHAT folk about why they don't consider something like Postfix, SMAIL, or the likes. I'm using Postfix, and found it a remarkably easy install.

    The problem with a transition is that there's a considerable body of anti-spam [sendmail.org] code that has been specifically written for Sendmail but not for the other mailers.

    RHAT adopted some of the antispam code, and has promoted it to the body of users of Red Hat Linux.

    Unfortunately for the notion of moving to a newer MTA, there is both:

    • A forcible necessity to continue supporting sites that want to use Sendmail;
    • A necessity to support the same antispam functionality they have already been supporting;
    • The cost of supporting two MTA's at the same time.

  • sendmail is not that bad, qmail is not that great (Score:4)

    by Tim Pierce ( 19033 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @09:49AM (#1496028)

    Sendmail is really not a bad choice. If you can get over your fear of the sendmail.cf language, it's very servicable on a modern machine.

    Sendmail's "insecurity" is largely a myth at this point. I do not recall seeing a root exploit since Sendmail-8.8, which was about three years ago. While qmail and Postfix can legitimately brag about being designed for security from the ground up, the sendmail team has done a pretty good cleanup job.

    Doubting Thomases should consider that OpenBSD [openbsd.org], the famously "ultra-secure" operating system, ships with sendmail, [tryc.on.ca] not qmail. How many people think that Theo de Raadt would put up with shipping software that has known exploits?

    We use sendmail to run one of the largest mailing list sites in the world. [rootsweb.com] My experiments with qmail were pretty hideous; qmail has serious problems out of the box with high-volume delivery. The mail queue backed up by several thousand messages, and one big list actually caused the server to crash. (I am told that there are patches [quaker.org] available to improve qmail's performance on very-high-volume sites. We have not had the opportunity to try them, but given my experience I am not sure that we want to.)

    I'm actually not a big fan of sendmail qua sendmail. But anti-sendmail sentiment is just pretty overblown these days, and the rebellion hype is not convincing. Sendmail is one of the classic open source success stories, it is a fine piece of software with a great future, and an excellent choice for a project to support.

  • One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.

    As you indicated, that is the classical man-month tenet, more formally known as Brooks Law. As ESR pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar [tuxedo.org], this doesn't hold true when people are working on a problem that they find interesting with a communications medium at least as good as the Internet. In the world of closed source, Brooks Law holds true, because when you throw money at a project, and hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project. You're getting developers who are interested in making a living. However,

    isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?

    For the most part, yes, but how much are they able to work on it? Most developers have to work on problems they are not interested in in order to make a living, and work on their interests in their own time. By adding funding to Mozilla, Red Hat presumably intends for Mozilla to do what Red Hat has done with Linux - find people who already find the problem interesting and are working on it, and pay them to work on problems they find interesting. Yes, they may work on things other than what you're hoping to get, but if done properly, they will still find the problems you want solved interesting and will continue working on them as well.
  • That's the stupidest thing I've read all day. How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's??? Seriously, it's part of their distro and they have nothing to gain by harming it. Moreover, they couldn't harm it even if they wanted to: It's Open Sourced, they don't exactly need to make sales.

    RedHat is investing into Mozilla so that they'll get a great browser for their flagship product, not to hurt Konquerer. I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. Where do people like you come from, anyway??

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • No it's not, but it is under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and the Netscape Public License (NPL). Although it's not GPL, both means free software as far as I can tell.
  • redhat is not making any more money than
    the day the stock went public...

    PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT STOCK in redhat and had faith
    and/or took a gamble are making money by selling
    redhat stock to those who want it--at a much
    higher price since demand has since gone through
    the roof.
  • (How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's???) RedHat is certainly favouring Gnome; KDE is favourite of Caldera and Corel. Thus favouring anything else than KDE/Konqueror makes sense to RedHat, since it is disadvantage of their main Linux competitors. (I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. ) Well, I doubt. The more Netscape, the less Konqueror. The less Konqueror, the less Caldera or Corel. (Where do people like you come from, anyway??) Romania, Estern Europe. Do you?
  • (How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's???) RedHat is certainly favouring Gnome; KDE is favourite of Caldera and Corel. Thus favouring anything else than KDE/Konqueror makes sense to RedHat, since it is disadvantage of their main Linux competitors. (I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. ) Well, I doubt. The more Netscape, the less Konqueror. The less Konqueror, the less Caldera or Corel. (Where do people like you come from, anyway??) Romania, Eastern Europe. Do you?
  • But... Mozilla IS free. Unless you're one of those who subscribes to the view that it's not free unless it's GPL. Other than Netscape and KDE, does Red Hat Linux have any non-free packages on its freely-distributable CD?

  • What the fuck good are computers anyways? They are prone to failures, expensive, and wholly unnecessary. Why the fuck are they developing anything for computers? Whats the point with that?

    They are useful but networks are not.

    Why not develope some new flavours of beer instead. Computers are just bad anyways.

    I don't know how people can prattle on about beer. Beer and other alchol based beveages are known to cause damage to critical higher reasoning areas of the brain. Plus flavored beer could just as easily be done with a minimum of effort.

    Are you seriously arguing that they ought not develop network apps because networks sometimes fail are too expensive for some? Is this a joke that I didn't get? Have you checked your perscriptions?

    I got the impression that that's was all that people cared about after reading freshmeat for several months. Basically all of the stuff was network centric and had little redeaming value. It seemed like people didn't care about the undering quality of the information but that they could shuttle it around in strange and unusual ways. Why not develop an app that uses fractal enhancements to allow for an arbitrary finite resolution enhancement to photos? I saw this on some documentary on fractals but have as of yet not see hide nor hare of in linux. The rearrangement of priorities into things that are useless or not as important (shuttling things around) than the quality of the stuff that is being moved (ideas)
  • Theo can't release binaries of qmail; Dan's license prohibits that. Such a restriction would rather hamper its adoption as a primary mailer for any operating system. If you want a better replacement for Sendmail, try Postfix. It's license is very nice, it's configured similarly, and I don't lose any sleep over it.

    --
  • I see a lot of "why not invest in qmail or postfix" comments, and I have to admit that at first I thought the same way. However, if you think of this from a support standpoint, Red Hat users are currently running Sendmail, and Red Hat needs to support it. This annoncement is just a nice way of saying, "There are a number of problems or shortcomings that will cost us a lot to support, and we just want them fixed." That's my take.

    Mozilla is pretty much the same way. They want to stop getting support calls about how netscape crashes all the time, so they put money into Mozilla, which is already on their map for upcoming versions.

    This is not a change in policy, just a PR wrapper around customer support R&D....
  • Network connectivity has really fallen in price... You can get an unlimited dialup connection for 9.95 almost anywhere in the US.

    But in theory can I connect at 300 baud? Without backwards compatability we are nothing.

    For christ sakes, I have a 3 meg cable modem connection for less than $40/month. That's dirt cheap! They could charge $200/month and I'd still pay! It's like having a T1 to my house...


    Until everyone on the block decides to get a cable modem because of the stellar product endosement. Then you have sub modem speeds again for $40/month
  • Throwing developers at things doesn't always (often?) work. But a volunteer effort can really benefit from concentrated attention, and RedHat donating a few developers can provide some of that, and can also work on making sure _all_ the loose ends get worked on, which is difficult in a large volunteer project.
  • Uh huh.

    MS fund the open source projects ActiveState's Perl and Transvirtual's Kaffe...just to mention 2.


    Redhat are still buying out companies, and it's to gain them in the end, just like MS does, so don't tell me that just cause they make it open source makes it all better. In the end, what could happen? Redhat corner the market in those areas, other projects like mozilla can't succeed. Who cares right? Mozilla is open source. Everyone who keeps complaning about MS should care, cause it's a marketing thing, noone will use anything but REDHAT supported mozilla.
  • I really like Exim [exim.org]. It does what I need it to do, with minimal fuss. I also like that Exim is GPLd.

    And, it's really quite flexible. There are other good MTAs of course, but I wouldn't count Sendmail among them.


    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org].

  • If we measured the ammount of reliability of various services we would see that networks are far less reliable than say water or even electricity.

    And this has what to do with Red Hat? Do you think RHAT should be investing in sewers? What's your point?

    Storing information remotely requires a large ammount of money.

    Depends on what you're storing.

    [...] all your personal games/music/term papers/books /etc and put all of it on the web?

    Why would you want to do this? Sheer geek factor? OK, let's assume you have some motive....

    It would be the height of lunacy to store all this information on the existing "web hosting" sites. They're not scaled for it. Either you'd want to do it yourself, or you'd want a full data storage site -- not a "web hosting" site, that's for small amounts of data.

    If you were going to do it yourself, you'd need a whole bunch of disk drives (RAID 4 or RAID 5 preferably), and enough computers (or equivalent devices, like NetApp NFS toasters) to control them. You'd probably want some serious UPSes, or maybe a generator. (Or both.) And most importantly, you'd need a network capable of getting the data from the storage farm to the computers that want to use it. If you want to use it from multiple sites, then you'll need a WAN, or you could use the Internet (if you have a permanent connection). If you want to use it from anywhere then you'll need to connect it to the Internet. At that point, you have just become a data warehouse. So why not throw in a few more TB of storage and offer service to others to help recoup your costs?

    And what does this have to do with RHAT?

    I have had personal experience with slashdot not being avaible or timely or even speedy for quite a while.

    ... and therefore Red Hat should not invest in Mozilla or Sendmail? Are you just whining to hear yourself whine?

    In short networking is for the aristocrats.

    No, it's accessible to even lower middle-class people in the USA. Even some of the poor can get online if they're clever enough to use the local public libraries.

    Do you think RHAT should invest in something that will improve the lives of the poor? Well, that's really noble, but it's a lousy business model. The poor don't have much disposable discretionary income to throw at RHAT.

    For example what happens if I want to connect to the internet at 300bps or lower?

    I don't think I could find a 300 baud modem if I tried. I've got an old 1200 baud at home, but it's broken. I've got a working 2400 baud....

    Why can't the modem at the ISP simply take the connection and allow me to give up some of the possible 53kps to allow me to connect?

    I don't know of any reason why this wouldn't work, but I must admit I haven't actually tried it (see above), and my theoretical background in analog/digital conversion is a bit lacking. Have you actually tried this? What problems did you encounter?

    Seriously, if you can afford $120 - $240 USD a year (depending on where you live) for a dialup connection, you can afford at least a 14.4kbps modem. And I know a 14.4kbps modem will work with my ISP, because I've done it. (I still have the 14.4kbps modem, too. I'd estimate its resale value at about $5 USD -- not worth the effort it would take to find a buyer.)

  • It is interesting to note how RedHat has turned a full 180 degrees concerning its stance towards Microsoft. I recall that their policy was - not so long ago - that they specifically did not compete with Microsoft.

    I really do have to assume that this is what they were originally aiming at anyway. For some reason - may it be the Microsoft trial or inappropriate timing - they kept it a secret. Building momentum, mayhaps.

    In any case, this means that RedHat remains everyone's favorite child. The market loves them, the Open Source community still backs them (even though a lot of criticism exists). It may inevitable lead to a clash between RedHat and the community.. but that's far off, so let's enjoy the show for now.

  • Repeat 3 times: the US is not the world.

    You are in an enormously priviledged position in the US - you probably have no idea how much we in the UK envy your free local calls.

  • perhaps if mozilla hurry's and gets stable, it and opera can duke it out while PC Magazine writes little articles about it in all of which they say: "Linux, an alternative to Windows invented by Finnish developer, Linus Torvalds and is now maintained by a team of hackers around the globe..."
    Die resource-sucking Netscape!!!

    --
    David,
    the supreme commander
    of the anti-authority club.

  • Of course, postfix is not a big name yet, like sendmail, and they're already sponsored.

    Shortly after postfix was released there was a big fuss about the license - it was revokable. I think this prevented a lot of people from using it. I considered the software unusable because of this, I didn't even bother to try it out.

    I just checked, and the change log says that as of postfix-19990906, the license does not carry the "controversial termination clause". I skimmed the license, and it was obviously written by a lot of lawyers, I don't know if any have decoded it yet.

    It's got a really weird paragraph. Under "7. GENERAL":

    If Recipient institutes patent litigation against a Contributor with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), then any patent licenses granted by that Contributor to such Recipient under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. In addition, If Recipient institutes patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Program itself (excluding combinations of the Program with other software or hardware) infringes such Recipient's patent(s), then such Recipient's rights granted under Section 2(b) shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

    They define contributor as "IBM and any other entity that distributes the Program". I -think- that this doesn't matter because the agreement doesn't actually grant any patent licenses. I'm just worried about that paragraph hurting people trying to defend themselves against software patents. (especially the "including a cross-claim or counterclaim", my understanding is that this is standard in patent suits).

  • I spent some time with the Mnemonic when it first came out. I think its big problem was that it broke 2 of the Bazaar rules for the Open Source
    projects:

    1. No code had been written yet, and there was few people to build that code (lots of people who
      could outline what was needed though)
    2. No central person who could people could focus
      on (no Linus).


    The ideas though were very very good in having a modular browser... it just takes a LOT of work
    to do it.

    The problems with Mozilla have been the fact that they needed to rewrite stuff for a long time,
    and very few people had experience to help on it. Those who had the experience were usually under
    NDA's for other companies (I was still under my
    stuff from Spyglass).

    Finally, Sendmail may be a dinosaur, but it still has marketshare... Most major companies seem to want to use it still. Red Hat may offer support for Postfix also... but the share of requests has been small.

  • Better is a very subjective term here. The MPL is a descent license in its own right, but is does hamper code exchange with the "rest" of the world who uses (L)GPL. But AFAIK if you ask you as usually permited to relicense any code you need for a project under the GPL.
    Hopefully in the future they will decide to GPL it
    outright.
  • people invest in red hat
    people invest in microsoft
    red hat = microsoft

  • I suspect that what keeps Bob Young awake at night is the thought that, implicit in his company's stock price, the market is assuming that his company will be generating earnings of approx US$500mm - US$1 billion. In the long run, the market will look for earnings, not buzz. When that day arrives, RH had damn well better have plenty of earnings on their 10-Q, or the bubble will burst.

    If I was in Mr. Young's shoes (oh, would that I were!), I'd be looking to do two things, fast.

    1) Use my ultra-cheap currency (stock) to buy things of real value (i.e. companies that are actually making money) while the stock is still up in the stratosphere.

    2) Use my IPO funds to seed applications and technology that are critical to the success of RH. (No, not "the Linux community" - Mr. Young & Co. are duty-bound to look out for their shareholders, not the rest of us. It is a happy consequence of the GPL, and similar licenses, that what benefits RH will, in most every case, benefit most of us who are using Linux/BSD/whatever, but for his shareholders' sake, I hope that's not his motive.)

    It appears from the acquisition of Cygnus that RH is already pursuing strategy #1 with vigor. If the Corel rumors pan out, they'll not only be acquiring earnings and technology, but also acting as a market consolidator.

    It appears from these announcements that they also understand the importance (financial and political) of pursuing strategy #2.

    Whenever you see an announcement like this, ask yourself: is this deal being done in cash (which, for a company with US$15mm revenues, is quite costly even post-IPO) or in stock (which is getting cheaper by the day)? Discount all-stock deals accordingly.
  • Let's not forget that UNIX is the competitor that would get hit first if RedHat becomes aggressive.

    How can you say that? Solaris, and all the other Unix' for that matter are focused on doing things that Linux doesn't do well. Things that W2K doesn't do well in either, for that matter.

    I don't know of anyone who *needs* Solaris, who would be interested in replacing it with Linux. Linux does what it does, and what it does it does well, but it doesn't do what Solaris does.

    Solaris and Linux, or any Unix and Linux complement each other. Consider what Compaq is doing with Linux and Tru64. That is the place for Linux.

    You are wrong. Linux will be used in Small Networks. Solaris hasn't been designed for that. NT has. Linux will be used as desktops. Solaris hasn't been designed for that. NT has. Consider small internet services. NT? Solaris?

    What is Microsoft's strength? Providing low-cost solutions for commodity solutions. People use Microsoft because it's the cheapest. People don't use Solaris because it's the cheapest solution. They use Solaris because it is powerful and reliable. Think 64 cpu systems, and huge RAID's.

    Linux on the other hand is extremely inexpensive, compared to Solaris, and even NT, and extremely well supported. It does all the small stuff well, and inexpensively. But it doesn't do the things that Solaris does well, and probably won't for a long time, and probably doesn't need too. But it does what NT does extremely well.

    Microsoft won't be an issue for Linux and RedHat until UNIX is already dead, and Sun is the prime target in that space.

    Trust me, before Linux takes any significant marketshare from Solaris, Microsoft's market share will be just a dream of Gates.

    -Brent
    --
  • Instead of sendmail, they should sponsor KDE or Gnome (or both!) or how about a project to modernize printing on Unix.

    Actually, Red Hat already actively develop's Gnome.

    -Brent
    --
  • I too was very much turned off by the marketing "features" creeping into both netscape and mozilla releases. Is there any way to get rid of them? I hope they can be customized away in Mozilla.

    It's just wrong that you can't choose to not install AOL IM. Even if you go and delete the AIM directory inside netscape communicator folders, you are still left with the annoying button on your browser window. The "shop" buttons are similar garbage. Am I the only one who is offended by this? At work I received a compaq laptop and it came with a shopping button.. blech. I traded up for a toshiba instead.

    Listen here corporate america, I don't want any shopping button. I don't want any push-content channels on my desktop. I don't want instant messaging software controlled by a third party server- all I want is a fast, powerful computer with applications that do no more than they need to. My computer is a tool, not my personal temple to consumerism.

    While I'm in rant mode... Ever notice how even if you choose custom install on windows98 and deselect the "online services" junk, they are still installed on your hard drive and show up on the desktop. Blech.
  • I am glad that Red Hat are supporting a multiplatform and desktop independant Web browser. A browser like Konqueror(sp?) is not desktop independant, and therefore if I do no wish to use KDE, then Mozilla is much better.

    Problem is, Mozilla like Nescape is more than a browser which makes it not as light as it could be. Please drop the mail and webeditor parts of it.

  • Deep breath...

    Repeat after me: Mozilla is Open Source. Open Source means infinitely customizable. Open Source means if you want to compile out the shop button, odds are someone with a brain (which clearly you aren't) will probably want to too, and take it out for you.

    Seriously, people- the rantings and ravings about bloat and the like in Mozilla drive me nuts. If you want a "pure" browser, go use lynx or wc3. If you want a graphical browser that stands a snowballs chance in hell against IE, either put up with the bloat or go in and fix it. You can, you know...
    ~luge
  • Of corse there in it for the money, they always were. what the hell did you exspect? Don't like it? use debian
    --
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • SGI seems like a good target for Red Hat. Really cool technology, great Linux stuff. And they could certainly afford it.

    --

  • I tried connecting to my ISP with a 300baud connection, but it never gave me anything less then 1200 (I was using a 33.6k)
    --
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • As far as i know, many of the people in this forum have never given Redhat ANYTHING, yet you whine and complain with every move that stands to significantly benefit you or your cause. Don't like sendmail now? Well, a little extra development "oomph" couldn't hurt it. Is Mozilla progressing too slowly for you? Same idea. The point here is that Redhat does a lot of work for the linux community, and gives back all the source code as GNU software, at no cost to you. Sure, they're the largest software distributor of linux, sure they often cater to newbies, but they're one of the best things linux has going for it. As linux continues to grow, you can either accept that Redhat will be a major factor in that, or go use something else. The reason people hate MS is because of its low quality, bloated software, and cut throat business tactics, NOT because they're the biggest. Don't hate something because it is big, hate it for a good reason.


  • Since it's alpha, people shouldn't be suggesting that what it really needs is "marketing something-or-other". It needs development. That's the point I was trying to make.

  • Um, if you had understood one shit about the whole Open Source movement, you would not be here telling other people that they ought to write the sort of software you want. If you want this, write it yourself.

    Don't go around saying people shouldn't be developing perfectly good applications. Connectivity is one of the most important things that has happened to mankind lately, and definetly the most important part of computers. Until my computer became part of the Internet it was of little interest to me, now it is the most important tool I have. There are other valid applications of computers (as a student of Scientific Computing, I should know), and if you want the sort of tools you discuss just write them.

    consider: how important is a fractal enhancer to photos in my life, how important are my browser and mailer?

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • Sendmail has had its decades of usefulness. Many very bright people have worked very hard for years at producing MTAs that are better than sendmail in numerous respects. The top three replacement MTAs (**in_alphabetic_order** Exim, qmail and zmailer) have a superb track record and are in use all over the net running the mail exchangers and delivery back ends for multi-million customer ISPs. They are also easy to use and configure on single-user workstations. There is no reason not to use them.

    Of course, people do like to use whatever system they are currently used to, and that's why most people currently run Windows. Despite that, we try to overcome their inertia and show them that there is a better technology available.

    Let's do the same for sendmail. It served us well in its day, but since there is no *technical* reason left for anyone to prefer sendmail over the newer MTAs, let's relegate it to the annals of history at long last. Its use should be deprecated.
  • All the newer MTAs are better than sendmail, largely because sendmail was the reference and they were developed purposely to be better than sendmail.

    Exim, qmail, zmailer, postfix and smail are probably the five best known, and the first three in the list are used extremely widely in mega ISPs all over the world. So is sendmail, but that's changing as sysadmins discover that alternatives to it exist.

    The improvement achieved by switching from sendmail to a more modern MTA can be massive: eg. when we converted our systems from sendmail to Exim some 3 years ago, the throughput increased by a factor of 10, and that was without any optimization.

    Sendmail has nothing *technical* going for it. It's used a lot merely because it comes pre-installed on virtually every Unix system, which of course is exactly the same reason why most people use Windows on PCs. It's not a particularly good reason.
  • err, GNOME doesn't include a replacement for sendmail. Postfix and Qmail (and others) are replacements for sendmail; unfortunately Qmail's author refuses to use an open-source compliant license, so it's out for RedHat. But Postfix would be a much better default than Sendmail; I wish they would use it as default MTA in their distribution, instead of doing political moves like collaborating with Sendmail, Inc.

    as for Mozilla, well, whatever can help bring it to usability soon, will be good.

  • yes, sendmail is the most powerful MTA out there, in that its config language is even Turing-complete. great. now, a few months ago I needed to do something quite unusual with an MTA (keeping some usernames locally, while passing others to another SMTP server, ignoring MX records in the process). with qmail, it was a matter of reading a few manpages, then finding the right place to make a change, and adding 5 lines of C to the source. now, this may sound harder than just tweaking a config file, but it isn't necessarily. qmail's code is quite clear (although the style is unusual), and the whole thing took about two hours, testing included. I certainly didn't need to buy a book, or anything like that. I'm sure that, with Sendmail, I would have needed more time just to understand what to change in the config file. IMO, there is something seriously wrong about an MTA that needs *books* to be written about it.
  • And on top of that it got a +1 moderation!!!!

    This has been happening quite often lately. Bad moderation is out of control; it is not being checked by meta-moderation.

    I really think they need to only allow moderator points to accounts with karma over 20 or something.

    Funny thing is that I have a decent karma, but have only moderated twice. And I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for two years.


    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org].

  • Yes, that's what it was. I couldn't remember exactly what part of the M releases I was having a hard time with, but knew there was something.

    I've been following the M's since 5 regularly but stopped when I found one that included the "Smart browsing" keywords that send all the addresses you type in back to netscape for massaging. I always disable this in the regular netscape releases, but was hoping that the open source version would come with more privacy-friendly defaults.

    I haven't checked the latest release. I'll take your word for it that it's been taken out, or at least disabled as the default. Thanks for that info.

  • You might like Exim then. The requirement you stated can be configured directly in its wonderfully clear yet powerful configuration language, without needing any additional code.

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