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Pegasus and Mercury Circling the Drain
Daemon Duck writes "One of the web's oldest and most respected email clients is flickering out of existence. Pegasus mail and its companion SMTP server, Mercury32, have been discontinued due to lack of funding for the ongoing development. On the website, the author David Harris states that if some funding becomes available he would consider opening the source code or continuing the development."
That's just it of course: Pegasus was a great product for its time, but has failed to keep up with competitors. Nearly everyone has already switched over to Thunderbird or something else. Pegasus is being replaced by technologically superior products, and now the developer can't find anyone willing to pay him to develop it anymore. This is no real surprise.
The post is really just an attempt to get some money. The fact that he would continue to develop it if he were paid probably goes without saying. However, he's also saying he would "consider" opening the code if he were paid enough, suggesting that if no donors come forward, he would simple delete the code and completely kill the product. This suggests to me that he's not really interested in open sourcing anything, but that he'll write that he will (if paid) in order to increase his chances of getting press on open source-centric sites like Slashdot.
>I have to admit I know nothing about his program,
>but I fail to see the connection between open
>source and him getting paid.
1. One or more people want it to be open-sourced.
2. The author (like you, unless perhaps you are
a monk) wants money.
An exchange either will or won't happen.
If there aren't enough people in #1 above, or if they
don't want it badly enough to pay, then maybe he will
eventually give it away for free, like something that
wouldn't sell in a garage sale or on EBay.
He doesn't have to give his work away for free if
he doesn't want to.
He may be considering the inevitable time investment that would come from helping people actually understand the released source. Or (though less likely), there may be IP rights involved.
To think that the project will automatically bloom by virtue of it becoming open source seems a bit presumptuous to me. Sure, it will definitely help towards it remaining a viable project, but taking a look at all the dead unmaintained projects in SourceForge tells me that having it open source is by no means a guarantee that it will bloom.
I subscribe to the Mercury mailing list and last week David Harris (the author of Mercury and Pmail) posted a message about the future semi-commercial direction Mercury would take in 2007. There was one follow-up post that complained (in a polite way) about having to pay and David, in my opinion, went off the deep end. That same day he posted on pmail.com that they were both discontinued.
The only money he ever asked for Mercury was for a set of manuals. I never needed a set of manuals, Mercury is easy to set up and use, and of course the mailing list is a good resource. I think a Donate button in Pegasus and Mercury would have kept him much more interested. As someone on the Mercury list said, if Pegasus Mail has 1 million users and everyone donated a dollar, that would make things much more interesting. Mercury was stagnating, new versions were few and far between.
"Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included)"
Why should he care what you think? Honestly your post is a great example of why he would do it.
If he just released the code in a currently unusable form all that would happen is people would complain about how crappy it is. That is the problem with most free software users lately. They feel that by using a free program they are doing the authors a favor.
Frankly I just hope he hits delete. Hell he is even helping write migration tools for current users free of charge.
What a bunch of ungrateful people users are.
I hope him all the best and thank him for the gift of his time and talents.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.