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."

Comments

Re:long time user.

[eln]

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.

Re:Why not open it now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:There's nothing wrong with making money.

[LWATCDR]

"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.