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Pegasus and Mercury Circling the Drain

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the check-is-in-the-mail dept.

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."

3 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Funding? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    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

    Hmm... why would it cost him anything to release the source code? He could just post it on SourceForge.

    Looks like someone wants a monetary incentive to release it. I'll bet nobody will complain about it, however. Far easier to just call MS evil for daring to charge money for software (and while praising Apple for doing the same thing, of course).

  2. Just open source it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    I understand that this guy is skeptical of an open-source *funding* model but I think he is missing the point. His concern is that continued development is going to cost him time/money. But if he opens the source, he doesn't have to develop the software himself, or at all. Other people can fork the project and not even bother him about it -- "his baby" can be left intact the way it is. At this stage he's not going to profit from the software either way, so really it boils down to how he wants the project to die -- locked up on his hard drive, or as source code that other people can use to learn something about email. Personally, if I was thinking about the legacy of the software, I'd opt for the latter.

    I think, really, he is just being hopelessly optimistic that some company is going to come and buy him out. But between Outlook and Thunderbird, and the prevalence of web mail, there is simply no market for end-user email software with a one-man dev team, and especially not on Windows.

  3. Gimme $$$s by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1, Redundant
    David Harris states that if some funding becomes available he would consider opening the source code or continuing the development.

    While I can understand the need to eat and keep a roof over one's head while continuing to provide and improve free software, how much does it cost to simply open source the code?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."