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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."
I went to the web page and see that, as reported by Scuttle Monkey, the author says he might continue working on it or make it open source with some funding. What does funding have to do with making it opern source? He could make it open source today if he really wanted to. It just seems to me that he's yet another guy who's pissed off that he can't make a living off the internet, so he's holding his source code hostage. I have to admit I know nothing about his program, but I fail to see the connection between open source and him getting paid.
I think "it takes money to make money" is still as valid a saying as ever. The problem David Harris has is shared by MANY software developers out there. They initially get motivated to "build a better mousetrap", and they succeed. Their product is adopted by millions of users (often because it costs them nothing to use it, but has obvious benefits worth the switch and learning curve). Over time, the author feels that he/she deserves financial compensation for the now highly-regarded product and becomes disenchanted with the situation. Development stagnates, and new products overtake it.
To overcome this, I think the real answer is to invest some money in advertising a newer, more advanced version of the software product. (The old one can then serve as a "lite" version, maintained simply to help keep your "brand" alive, and to introduce new people to the product's existence.) Otherwise, you can't really break free of the "development/ascent/decline" lifecycle that all products undergo.