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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."
If the funding has dried up, and he's prepared to move on to other things, why not open it? Pegasus was my first mail client, and I for one would like to see it bloom as an open source package rather than die a slow, horrible death as abandonware.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
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.
From TFA:
if sponsors could be found to provide modest ongoing funding, I would be happy to
continue developing the programs, and would even consider opening the source.
-------------
Does it cost to open the source? It's not as simple as opening a SourceForge account and posting the source under the GPL?
One might be inclined to think Pegasus is flickering out of existance because is isn't open source. I remember early on moving from Pegasus to Eudora email because Eudora's simplicity and features were better. When Eudora became an advertisement-laden mess, the open source Thunderbird showed up to fill the gap and I haven't looked back. Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago. Evolution in action.
{ - Generic Guy - }
It was a godsend for me when I first found it. Working for a rural publisher meant we got *big* files down our 56k line. The ability to see and manipulate the mail queue for those of us not fortunate enough to be on *nix was truly empowering. There was no webmail, no alternative. We had been downloading 30Mb files overnight to try and get at our email... Heh. Good old simple "viruses come on floppies" days :)
It is official; Slashdot now confirms: *Pegasus is dying
/. confirmed that *Pegasus market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all clients. Coming close on the heels of a recent /. survey which plainly states that *Pegasus has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *Pegasus is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Pegasus community when
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Pegasus' future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Pegasus faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Pegasus because *Pegasus is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Pegasus. As many of us are already aware, *Pegasus continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
There can no longer be any doubt: Pegasus is dying.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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.
...but BSD was plugging up the drain hole. Or so I've been told from time to time.
Moving something to open source and give it a chance at survival is a lot of work. I tried to move a bunch of my libraries to open source only to discover a total lack of documentation; not just API but architectural. If its put out without polish, its DOA.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the lack of funding indicate that nobody wants to use it anymore? Free market in action and all that?
Further, what would Pegasus do that thunderbird or outlook doesn't do? Would it be better money spent writing custom plugins for thunderbird?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"What does funding have to do with making it open 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 used to use this program a long time ago. It was a very good program.
1. Holding it hostage? He wrote it so he can do with it what he wants.
2. He did a lot of work. He would like to get paid for his work so funding is important. Things like food, mortgage, health care....
So it comes down to this. He will sell his work to the community if they pay him. It is his work so he has that right. If no one wants it enough to pay for it he is going to walk a way. If you don't like it use thunderbird.
These programs have been around for a long time. I used it on a Novell V3 system for email.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well, it's important because David Harris has been producing a very high-quality gratis email client for Windows for nearly 17 years, funded entirely by voluntary manual purchases and support subscriptions, and he cannot do so any longer. For an idea of exactly how advanced the capabilities of Pegasus Mail are, take a look at his still-available-if-you-know-where-to-look Overview page, and especially at the "history of Pegasus Mail" link thereon.
So far as opening the source goes, I'd love to see it happen (actually, I'd love to see someone hire him to run it as an open-source project), but I don't know how dynamic a community could be forged around a Win32 codebase that I understand to be optimized for performance and minimum resource use over modularity, portability, and ease of future development.
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Old dinosaurs wither...
Pegasus mail was great when it started. Then a Windows version emerged, with was potent, flexible and useful, despite some quirks (you could not select anything less than a line in message text -- this gave me the habit I still follow to put URLs in e-mails on a single line without unrelated text).
But it is obviously a product that evolved by slapping-on additions haphazarldy; the configuration was nothing but unified. Related features were spread accross several configuration screens amongst several configuration options, without a grand master plan.
In the end, it was a sorry kluge that was easily replaced by other clients (Eudora, Thunderbird) who eventually evolved to Pegasus' capabilities, but without the configuration nightmare.
So it arrived at it's natural end of life. It cannot compete against nimbler and swifter clients, so it now belongs in the annals of internet paleontology as a reverable footnote, much as the Great Eastern does in steamship paleontology or The Rocket in locomotive paleontology.
R.I.P. Pegasus, you won't be forgotten, but certainly not missed.
It's time to move on. Perhaps Mr Harris could bring his expertise and experience to Thunderbird, where he would be more than welcome.
Gee he has provided this software FREE of CHARGE for 16+ years. While he never said what the problem was the Author is claiming that he is having some money problems and is no longer going to have the time to work on this program.
He would have to do a lot of work to open source it since he is using a third party editor component he is offering to take it open source if he can make a living at it. I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
You can't just open source software, there is work to do to open source it. First, you have to inspect the licenses of any module/code that you include to make sure that it is open sourceable. You also have to have a build system in place that works with open source. Is it truly open source, if you have to buy Microsoft's Visual Studio to build it?
I finally got the source code for Post Road Mailer (native OS/2 application). Before I can start working on it, I have to build a project file for Visual SlickEdit, then linting (or is it de-lint) it, then port it over to Watcom or Gcc. There may be some legal some issues that prevent me from open sourcing it, but I hope to get it working well enough to start distributing it -- legally, free as in beer.
Fight Spammers!
You can find more detailed information on this move the following link, by a Pegasus Mail beta tester:
. html
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/dh_upd1
By the way, I'd love to see Pegasus Mail open sourced. It's a marvelous e-mailing package. It's UI isn't the most intuitive around, but once you get used to it, it becomes a very powerful tool for your mail needs. Many years ago I evaluated a lot of e-mail softwares, including Eudora, and ended up choosing Pegasus Mail. It's really worth it.
I would surely help if a fund for purchasing and open sourcing it was established.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
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) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some other programmer: figure out a way to shoehorn an existing open-source editor, or a new one, in place of the one that's been removed. Sounds like a good thesis project for a comp-sci student somewhere.
I don't fault the guy for wanting to make money, I really don't. (I work on closed-source software to pay the bills, and we don't even give it away free-as-in-beer.) But he's not going to win any friends by holding the code effectively hostage; since he's not known as being an OSS developer, he's going to have to take the first step if he wants to receive funding from people who are ideologically motivated in that direction. A good first step would be opening up whatever code is his to release in whatever form it's currently in, just to prove that he's not playing Pit and the Pendulum with the Delete key on the whole project.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In the year since I moved to an Apple machine I've come to understand how solid and useful Pegasus Mail had become. In twelve months I've moved from Apple Mail (which I found much too limited), to Eudora (what a bizarre interface, at least for me) to Thunderbird, and now to Gyazmail.
Each of these lacks at least a couple of must have features that I used extensively on Pmail. Thunderbird tries hard, but it always seems that the feature that I need most isn't quite finished.
Gyazmail comes close, but still has some gaping weaknesses, like the apparent inability to add addresses to the Addressbook from within the program, and a good Search function.
Ultimately Pegasus was probably best loved by those who live and breathe e-mail, and who need power and flexibility, as well as reliability. yes it was free, but it was one of those programs that I would have paid for because it suited my needs so well.
Three Squirrels
Mercury corrupted large amounts of my email at port.ac.uk and caused me absolute nightmares. I'm tempted to open a bottle of champagne tonight to celebrate it going down the drain.
> Gee he has provided this software FREE of CHARGE for 16+ years.
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
The BlitzMail system at Dartmouth is also being replaced. There is a real sense of loss when these things get replaced, at least for geeks like me. I probably spent as much time blitzing people as I did with any of my classes. These systems--and on campus Blitz is basically your number 1 conduit to other students--are really serving the role of a "3rd Place" that coffee shops and bars and such try to fill. It will be like the day that MySpace goes offline: People spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. It's an important character in the history of your life.
Will the day ever come that we treat works of great software engineering with the same reverence that we treat 'traditional' forms of engineering? If someone unearthed an Abacus they would giddily rush it to their local museum. If they unearthed pristine copies of VisiCalc floppies they would probably be pissed off that somebody buried trash in their back yard.
I am sorry to see you won't be continuing the program. Open sourcing is a nice idea, but my guess is it will then become a weak Eudora or Thunderbird copy.
I wish you all the best in your future. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
If his code looks anything like mine, he's just too damn embarassed to show the world his tangled mess of strings, variables, and "Mystery Science Theater 3000" references that can only be called "code" due to its inarguable existence as electronic data that someone could tentatively try to run through a magical compiler if one were extraordinarily optimistic that the whole wretched thing would somehow do something not all that far from its intended function without damaging anything or anyone else near the computer desk physically or emotionally.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Yes; I understand that at shut-down the author doesn't want to suddenly incur large bandwidth fees and he could get hit with a lot of requests for the final version after making such an announcement,"
Why?
I have no idea why he is shunting down but stated that he is have some money problems. You also don't know what is happening in his life that forced him to stop this free development.
So you have gotten years of use out of this program and you paid how much? He is offering continued support to those that have paid for subscriptions until there subscriptions expire.
Seems to be that you for some reason think that you are owed something for using a free program.
It just boggles my mind. Heck you can even keep using the version you have for as long as you want. You have lost nothing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You can still download it.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I've just heard on Slashdot about the end of Pegasus Mail and Mercury. Being often in the Linux and OS X worlds, I liked PMail and it seemed extremely well written, but I was never the most hardcore user. I never had a need to use Mercury. I'm also a professional developer.
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain why I think you should probably Open Source these products. Not because it's good for the world, but because it's good for YOU. (I do think your creations have been good for the world, and I do think open sourcing them would be good for the world, but that isn't my main point.)
I wouldn't tell someone selling commercial software and making a big profit that it'll be better for them if it's Open Source. Indeed, if you promptly get a substantial monetary offer for continuing it or for selling the codebase I can understand why you might do that. But if you don't get one promptly, people are going to start migrating away in droves - so the chances are going to rapidly go down, not up.
You have basically two assets: A codebase and a userbase. (I'll include publicity with your userbase.) There are also many free competitors to your products. You have tough decisions to make that seem to involve: How can I turn these assets into money? Simply closing it down doesn't get you any money.
You could open source this project with minimal cost. As I understand there may be portions you can't release that way, simply remove them. With some luck, enough people will want to help that they'll fix it. If you strike while the iron is hot and you still have many users, I think this is quite likely. If it doesn't happen, you aren't out anything but a few hours work, and the world has your code. If so few people cared about it, you probably weren't going to get any more for it. But if it does happen:
1. You can continue to release new versions of the software, even if you do minimal work on it yourself. By keeping it alive, you set yourself up to continue getting support contracts, and you'll still be the prime source for them. (If you aren't charging enough for the support contracts, that's an independent problem...)
2. Since you have already created the majority of the code, you can use a MySQL type dual license, which would allow you to release embedded versions of the code for someone else to wrap into a closed-source pay product. This is a niche that a pure-GPL product can't fill.
3. You could even simply put up some ads on the site.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
> 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
Failed to keep up? You're out of your chair.
If you compare Pegasus and Thunderbird side-by-side, Thunderbird looks positively feature-impoverished. If people have switched from Pegasus to Thunderbird, it is because they were no longer willing to be tied down to MS Windows. Running on other operating systems is the *one* meaningful feature Thunderbird possesses that Pegasus does not.
Going the other way, there are many downsides to Thunderbird, the most significant being that its filtering is nowhere near the same ballpark with Pegasus Mail's filtering. It doesn't have flow control. It can't filter based on status flags like has-been-read, has-been-answered, or cetera. It can't filter based on time elapsed since receipt (e.g., leave unread messages in the inbox for up to ten days, then move them to another folder based on these rules...). It can't highlight a message so that it shows up a different color in the list. It can't form-reply. It can't launch an external process to handle certain messages. Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Besides the filtering, there are a number of other useful features missing from Thunderbird too, but that one is really the biggie. If your mailreader can't presort your mail for you, whatever else it's going to do to save you time is going to pale by comparison.
Heck, even *Gnus* (the mailreader that has every feature *including* the kitchen sink, and a learning curve to match) is missing some of Pegasus Mail's more useful features, features that Pegasus Mail has had since 1996.
Pegasus Mail didn't fail to keep up, in terms of development or features. What happened is two things:
First, and most important, it failed to be ported to the operating systems that are used by power users who crave powerful software with powerful features. A great many former Pegasus Mail users no longer use Windows. Wine didn't mature fast enough, and users were forced to find other mailreaders that would run on the OS they wanted to use. Choice of mailreader, even a really great mailreader, was not a strong enough factor to drive the choice of operating systems.
Second, it lost the end-user market when operating system makers started bundling cheesy half-baked mailreaders with the OS. But it shares that trait with most other mailreaders, except for the bundled ones and the ones that were never aiming for the end-user market in the first place (e.g., Gnus).
I understand why *development* of Pegasus Mail has stopped, in the absense of funds. But it would be nice if it could continue to be distributed for another couple of years. It's still quite a good ways ahead of the dev curve. Thunderbird will catch up with it in time, but based on its progress to date it could be another five or ten years.
Meanwhile, I'm now stuck with no decent option to recommend to people who don't want to fight a learning curve (to adopt e.g. Gnus) and aren't satisified with Yet Another Lame Outlook Clone (e.g., Thunderbird).
If bandwidth costs are the problem, he could have just given permission for others to distribute the unchanged binaries.
I suspect what's really going on is that he hopes somebody offers to buy the source. Frankly, I hope so too. I've been hoping so for a while. If someone were to manage to port it to *nix/X11, I'd be a very happy man.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
David Harris has certainly provided an excellent set of email tools for *many* years now (17?) *for free*, being supported financially by *optional* support contributions and sales of manual (any other means?)
Remembering from the 'old' days when I used to help run our dept novel server for 120+ users, his programs were better and safer than many out there for years, and has always had powerful features. (both the email clients and email server) They were certainly better than the expensive and crappy email options offered by Novell at the time. I'm sure they have heavily influenced all of the other email clients & servers by the powerful features they introduced as well as their strong emphasis on security. I'm very sorry to hear that financial support for it has dwindled to this point, and I'm very sorry to see pmail go.
David Harris certainly deserves our thanks and respect for his many years of work and of providing his software for free, not the carping and accusations of motive seen here. (which seems to be mostly by those who have never even used his software, or heard of it?)
Open source has some great advantages, (especially for the user who doesn't have to do any work) but, like David's current model of development, it doesn't offer any guarantee of an income. Not everyone can work for free, especially full-time. Before carping at him, feel free to assign your trust fund over to him first. ;-) ... or try walking a great many miles in his shoes...
I'm sure that setting up his software tools as open source projects would entail some significant amount of up-front work, and possibly continuing efforts. His code is his, and it's certainly *more* than fair to ask for financial support or compensation in order to donate it to the public domain, and to put even more time, expertise and effort into the transition.
Anyway, thanks David, for your many years of effort, excellent software, and your generousity in sharing it with us for free.
I'm sorry it had to end for you on the down note that the past few years have evidently been.
Disclaimer: Yes, I've used Pegasus Mail for many years, though I've been using thunderbird lately. We're still using Pmail at home. And yes, I've put my money where my mouth is, sending financial contributions to DH several times. (though smaller than I would have liked to be able to)
You misunderstand. (Perhaps I wasn't clear in my original post, so I'll attempt to clarify.)
The group in which I worked provide core computing services for the entire university; that is, we made <user@example.edu> email addresses work. We did not use Mercury Mail; we used Solaris machines running sendmail and AMDS. The core mail infrastructure had to handle 30,000+ users, and had to be available 24x7x365, because it was what most people used.
Some departments deployed their own mail systems; e.g., <user@ee.example.edu>. Most of them made no attempt to coordinate with us, and with university politics being what they are, we couldn't compel them to cooperate with us. Since virtually no departments (outside of CS and IS) had people familiar with unix/sendmail systems in-house, Mercury Mail was a popular choice.
In other words, Mercury Mail was appealing to precisely the type of people who shouldn't have been running it: people who lacked enough expertise with Internet mail systems to recognize that the defaults were extremely dangerous.
You missed my point about the default settings. Other than shipping as an open relay by default (which no respectable MTA had done for years), most of the "poor defaults" were necessitated by the fundamental design flaws of Mercury Mail. We'd get pushback from departments when we asked them to set the queue processing interval to, say, every 15 minutes, instead of every 5 seconds. ("But we want our mail to go out right after we press the send button!")
I'm sorry, but any supposed MTA that is incapable of maintaining any state about its own mail queue is simply a toy, not a real MTA. Unfortunately, Mercury Mail was a toy that had just enough functionality to be truly dangerous.
I did point out the more egregious shortcomings of Mercury Mail to David Harris via email. I never received a response. I didn't expect to, either: I was pointing out misfeatures, not bugs. The latter can be easy to fix, but misfeatures are fundamental design flaws, and are very difficult to fix. (To this day, I still don't know if Mercury Mail was ever redesigned to associate state with queue entries. It wouldn't surprise me if it still doesn't.)
I'm not disputing that Mercury Mail might have been useful to small groups without enough expertise to run "real" mail infrastructures. But for those of us who did run real mail infrastructures, Mercury Mail was an agonizing curse. IMHO; its death is not only well-deserved, but a decade late. (I generally dislike giving Microsoft credit for anything, but Exchange is an order of magnitude better than Mercury Mail.)
(For the record, I have no opinion on Pegasus; I never used it, and never had issues with others who did. My vitriol is reserved solely for Mercury Mail.)
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Taking Money Back
Let's be completely clear here. David has never charged for his software. The only income he made off this is for the manuals purchased and his tech support. There is no and never has been a cash cow in support licences. As it was pointed out on the Mercury mailing list, we probably put a dent in his manual purchases by the help we offered. Cash cow indeed.