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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.
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 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.
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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.
Lots of people seem to be asking this, but the question that they don't ask is this: is the source to Pegasus and Mercury 100% an original creation of David Harris? If not, he may have to pay off other authors who wrote libraries or other code written by Harris. One reason so much of the Netscape source code had to be rewritten to produce Seamonkey (and ultimately Firefox), aside from so much of it being crufty, is that there was a ton of third-party code that came from Sun and other companies.
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In the past, I have taken a cautious "wait-and-see" approach to the idea of Open Source. I am now willing to accept that it is a valid model, and that it is producing some genuinely excellent packages (such as FireFox, of which I am inordinately fond). Ideologically, I believe that Open Source and I are a good match, and I would like to consider going that way.
There are still some major problems with the idea of going Open Source though: the most important is "How do I survive in an Open Source environment"? While Pegasus Mail and Mercury do not require a huge amount of money to develop and support, the fact remains that they *do* require a level of funding, and I am not entirely sure how this would work within an Open Source model. I feel it is significant that the majority of Open Source initiatives are either funded externally (Mozilla), or basically not funded at all (OpenLDAP, OpenSSL): it seems to me that while Open Source is an excellent technical solution to the problem of large-scale development using widely-spread teams, the area of Open Source business modeling is one that still has not been completely resolved.
The other major issue with Pegasus Mail is that it uses a proprietary third-party product as its core editor, and I would not be able to take that product with me into an Open Source environment. The same problems do not exist with Mercury, because I have written every line of the package myself, but with Pegasus Mail, the problem is significant.
So, there you have it: I am now favourably disposed to the idea of moving towards Open Source, but have to overcome some important issues before I go down that track. I am actively considering the issues and hope I can find workable solutions (such as a large, friendly, wealthy sponsor) in the not-too-distant future.
Hopefully this update to my position will reduce the amount of hate-mail I have received in the last three years from Open-Source zealots. While I understand the passion and admire the zeal of these people, I would suggest that a positive approach is always going to work better than trying to rip out my liver and feed it to the dogs. After all, this *is* my baby - I have been working on these programs and providing them free of charge for over fifteen years now, and I don't believe it's too much to ask if I expect a little basic human courtesy.
If you have suggestions and are willing to present them to me in a positive, encouraging manner, I will be happy to receive them.
David Harris
Owner/Author, Pegasus Mail and Mercury Systems,
April 20th 2005.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
"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.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
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> 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.
"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.
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.
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> 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.