Re: Open Source Developer Exchange (Economics)

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 08:21, Julius Steyn wrote: 
> "How to leverage the advantages, culture and experience of Open Source
> and
> to integrate these with the demands of business customers to such a
> degree
> that Open Source can become a better provider of business critical
> software - with lasting benefits to both developers and business
> customers"

Well, that sure is a mouth full. :-)

Put on the spot the only comment I can offer at the moment is somewhat
orthogonal.  OK, completely tangential...

I spent last week "shopping" for a pop3 server.  There is a pretty
popular one that a lot of folks I know use.  It's not GPL'ed but is
licensed under terms that only a lawyer would call really "free".  But
it is "open source" and as I said has a fairly large user base. There
have also been some security issues with it of late.  However, from a
"business" customer's point of view it may well be the optimal
solution.  But I feel some of its flaws too fundamental to ignore.

I hit Freshmeat for "pop3 server" and filtered for GPL.  Then I went
through the results kicking tires.  I reduced the list to six
candidates.  I downloaded the tarballs and took a look at what I got.  I
then checked mailing list archives for activity.

I tried out a promising looking one.  But after getting into the guts of
it I found it did not have a function I need.  Worse there was no easy
way for me to interface with it to provide that function.  Then worse
still the maintainer was completely unresponsive.  rm -rf

The second one did not look as mature but the mailing list was very
active with lots of "positive" posts from the maintainer.  It was quite
straightforward to get it working.  I found that I wanted a little more
flexibility with user authentication and posted my idea to the list. 
The maintainer liked my idea and added it to his "to-do" list. 
Additionally, he pointed out an API just for the purpose of adding other
auth schemes (to which I will be able to write a perl script to get what
I want in the meantime).  He (and another mailing list subscriber) also
got back to me right away with the undocumented syntax for doing
IP-based hosting.

So the tires on this pop3 server seem to be in good condition.  The
engine is hitting all the cylinders.  Sure, it needs a coat of paint but
that is just cosmetic eye-candy.  I'll take this one out on the road for
some serious drive-ability testing.

cheers,
ken