Red Hat to fund Mozilla and Sendmail?

aeiler writes "According to this PC Week article. Red Hat is looking to invest significant cash, engineering and marketing resources into the Mozilla project and Sendmail. "

Comments

Go Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to see this as Sendmail and Mozilla are very important to the OS movement

Re:Go Redhat

[PG13]

I really can't blame you as I have done the same thing myself but this posting of empty but ontopic first posts is kinda stupid. If you actually have something to say and get a first post good. Otherwise it just has more style to go for the real first post. Your an AC anyway so why do you care?

About Time!!

[Gandalf_007]

Good, it's about time someone with significant resources has decided to back the Mozilla project! If the next Milestone is as much of an improvement over M11 as M11 was over M10, we might actually have a usable browser!

Let's just hope that RH doesn't try to make the browser too biased toward their distribution.

Re:About Time!!

[Foogle]

I can't believe this was moderated up... Think about what you're saying: As if the people backing the Mozilla project so far were poor -- Hello? It's AOL. They've got about as much money as you could hope for, without being Microsoft. I don't think Mozilla was hurting in the money department.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:About Time!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the point is that Redhat's money will be more focused on enhancing mozilla on Linux, whereas I imagine AOL is more intrested in win32 at the moment.

Perhaps apple will jump in an assign some developers to make mozilla run better on macos. Unless their contract with the devil^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H microsoft won't allow that.

Re:About Time!!

[luge]

That may have been the author's point, but that too is misguided- not only does AOL have no real interest in helping out MS, 97% of the mozilla code is cross-platform. For better or for worse, most of Redhat's money will end up helping out all users- Mac, Linux, and Winblows.
~luge

Re:About Time!!

[Tarnar]

Despite AOL having lots and lots and lots of money, you don't see them pouring it into Mozilla's development. More hands would be welcome in the project, just put a bunch of Redhat employees to work full time on the Mozilla source. It's open source, and I can hardly see the Moz team saying "No, no, we don't need any help."

Well, they can afford it...

[Telcontar]

With a market cap. of now nearly 17(!) billion (twice as much as one month ago), their shares having risen today by 16% to $247, they can afford it... (although RH still only gets $14/share...).

Re:Well, they can afford it...

[Gregg M]

RH gets nothing. They already SOLD the shares. They do however own over 90% of the rest!

Re:Well, they can afford it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not these rumours are correct (see also the Corel rumour) - it serves one thing pretty well: raising the stock value.

Re:Well, they can afford it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not these rumours are correct (see also the Corel rumour) - it serves one thing pretty well: raising the stock value. This is what marketing is about, after all, and one of the greatest of Bob's virtues.

A Proof Point

[Ryandav]

Something to point to when reactionary idiots say uninformed things like how Redhat is like Microsoft:

RedHat funds other people to develop technology, and makes it available to everyone.
Microsoft buys out competing technology or intimidates it out of the market until they have their own implementation.

Way to go Redhat.

Re:A Proof Point

[slashdot-terminal]

Well they really don't because network centric technology is only good if you really need said network. Few people actually "need" such access in the course of their daily lives.

Re:A Proof Point

[TummyX]

Uh huh.

MS fund the open source projects ActiveState's Perl and Transvirtual's Kaffe...just to mention 2.


Redhat are still buying out companies, and it's to gain them in the end, just like MS does, so don't tell me that just cause they make it open source makes it all better. In the end, what could happen? Redhat corner the market in those areas, other projects like mozilla can't succeed. Who cares right? Mozilla is open source. Everyone who keeps complaning about MS should care, cause it's a marketing thing, noone will use anything but REDHAT supported mozilla.

Re:A Proof Point

[Anonymous Coward]

And do you really think they are just going to give up money and not get anything out of it. Looks like two good apps will be tainted again by the RH jaugernaut. Mark my word they will dirty up the code like they have done with 30% of the apps in 6.1. No one puts money into something and doesn't expect some kind of return on the investment. Remember they have stock holders to blow now. Guess its time to look for a new MTA no telling what new feature coughexploit they will try and add to it.....

Good ol' Red Hat

[rde]

An investment in Mozilla would help Red Hat on the desktop, where Linux has yet to significantly penetrate

Best news I've read in ages. There's no doubt that the browser is Linux's biggest weakness on the desktop at the moment, and an open source browser would go a long way to convincing many that Linux is a viable option to MS.

As for the inevitable anti-RH diatribes: pah! I say to you all. Red Hat has acted with honour on all occasions, and I'll continue to be a fan as long as they continue to do such great stuff for Linux, for Open Source and for Red Hat.

Re:Good ol' Red Hat

[um... Lucas]

The browser isn't Linux's most glaring weakness on the desktop at the moment. Try MS Office. Star Office doesn't stack up to it. How about a quick and dirty database, such as Access or Filemaker Pro? For SOHO and home users, where's Quicken and Quickbooks?

Until there's many more web apps than are available currently, as well as more fully featured apps, the browser is no where near 1st as far as getting Linux accepted on the desktop.

Re:Good ol' Red Hat

[T-Ranger]

Indeed

Any 5gl would be a good thing. Visual Basic, Fox Pro and the like are all valuable tools. And a good IDE would be nice (actualy Ill settle for something that dose syntax highlighting etc. for php).

But the SOHO market is a big one.. Novell is to this day fighting (not very well IMNSHO) the immage of Netware 3.x and its administratiblity.. NW 4.x and 5 are far easier to administrator than NT, but yet MS continues wins in the non fortune 500 market.

Novell is failing because they have a marketing department slightly less competent than that of Commodore's, not because they dont have the tools. So far, linux dosent quite have the tools, but it has the brand recognition... In the long run it will be a bad thing to have linux in the hands of 'normal people' before it is ready.. Thell get frustrated and leave, never to return (like all those people who once had NW3.x boxes and diddnt upgrade once they got win95 file and print shares).

Re:Good ol' Red Hat

[Heretik]

The browser is by far linux;s most glaring weakness.. people browse FAR more than they do desktop productivity stuff.. browsing is what most people do most of the time, and linux doesnt have a good browser, period. And judging by all this mozilla support, the only good one we have will be a big bloated one :/ )

Redhat is making some moves

[phrogman2]

This makes perfect sense, Red Hat seems to be positioning itself to be a major player in the hightech industry, not just the 'Alternative OS' market. Rumour has it they may be getting ready to purchase Corel as well. With Mozilla to provide a browser platform, and Corel Wordperfect Office suite to provide an office environment, they would be well placed to deal competitively with Microsoft (although they will have a long uphill climb in that battle). Looks like they have decided to leverage all that money they collected from their IPO to place themselves in direct competition to the big boys.

I would expect to see them purchase a few more companies to round out there holdings and widen their market.

Real monsters

[Oestergaard]

>> My mother said there aren't real monsters. But there are - Newt, Aliens II

Unfortunately both mozilla and sendmail are monsters. It is going to take a lot of effort to make sendmail a lean and mean mailer, and I don't see why anyone would care to even try. Postfix is out there, which has the features of sendmail (almost) and is already lean and mean. Of course, postfix is not a big name yet, like sendmail, and they're already sponsored. I think sponsoring sendmail is nothing but a political decision. It really gets us nowhere we can't go already.

Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?). Those seem to be much more clean by design, and actually sponsoring them could well give us a browser that was both lean and mean, and had the features we hope to get in a usable and stable manner from the Mozilla effort.

Although it hurts, sometimes it's best to let die what cannot live. I don't see a point in funding sendmail. I'm not so sure about mozilla, but with my impressions of it, I'd say there are better designs out there which are already posing nice features worthy of sponsorship.

What do you think ? Is sponsoring old monsters really the way to go ? IMHO it's not.

Re:Real monsters

[drunken monkey]

Don't give up on Mozilla so easily. It a completely new beast, no old code whatsoever.

You can have your KDE browser (I'm sure it will be good), but you need Mozilla to keep IE in check. Even if you use Linux, you should be worrying about IE.

narbey

Re:Real monsters

[Thrakkerzog]

Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?).

That would be very hard to do. Konqueror uses QT's signals and slots to do a lot of stuff. GTK doesn't have that, although it may be able to do it with libsig++. Why would it need to be ported to GTK, anyway? QT is not evil.

Re:Real monsters

[Anonymous Coward]

"but with my impressions of it"
That is kind of key to your evaluation of Mozilla. Mozilla is not monster code. Netscape was. It did not compile. It had big pieces missing. Abandoning lots of bloated old code, mostly starting from scratch, etc., then emerging with a small, compliant browser with 90+% common code base across platforms is not bad. It is not a quick process but it is resulting in a great new browser that promises to be able to set the tone for the future. I develop web sites for a living. The developing PHP on Linux with Postgres backend part is easy on Linux, but not the web page testing part. There is a lot of pressure to use windows if I don't have a browser that is more compliant than IE. I am happy with both what they are doing and the Mozilla team's progress. The web will not become friendlier for open standards because of Konqueror (not in the near or medium term anyway). IE needs competition on Windows!!

Re:Real monsters

[treat]

Of course, postfix is not a big name yet, like sendmail, and they're already sponsored.

Shortly after postfix was released there was a big fuss about the license - it was revokable. I think this prevented a lot of people from using it. I considered the software unusable because of this, I didn't even bother to try it out.

I just checked, and the change log says that as of postfix-19990906, the license does not carry the "controversial termination clause". I skimmed the license, and it was obviously written by a lot of lawyers, I don't know if any have decoded it yet.

It's got a really weird paragraph. Under "7. GENERAL":

If Recipient institutes patent litigation against a Contributor with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), then any patent licenses granted by that Contributor to such Recipient under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. In addition, If Recipient institutes patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Program itself (excluding combinations of the Program with other software or hardware) infringes such Recipient's patent(s), then such Recipient's rights granted under Section 2(b) shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

They define contributor as "IBM and any other entity that distributes the Program". I -think- that this doesn't matter because the agreement doesn't actually grant any patent licenses. I'm just worried about that paragraph hurting people trying to defend themselves against software patents. (especially the "including a cross-claim or counterclaim", my understanding is that this is standard in patent suits).

Re:Real monsters

[smooge]

I spent some time with the Mnemonic when it first came out. I think its big problem was that it broke 2 of the Bazaar rules for the Open Source
projects:

1. No code had been written yet, and there was few people to build that code (lots of people who
   could outline what was needed though)
   
2. No central person who could people could focus
   on (no Linus).
   

The ideas though were very very good in having a modular browser... it just takes a LOT of work
to do it.

The problems with Mozilla have been the fact that they needed to rewrite stuff for a long time,
and very few people had experience to help on it. Those who had the experience were usually under
NDA's for other companies (I was still under my
stuff from Spyglass).

Finally, Sendmail may be a dinosaur, but it still has marketshare... Most major companies seem to want to use it still. Red Hat may offer support for Postfix also... but the share of requests has been small.

Re:Real monsters

[Larry L]

Yea, u'd be wasting time by porting it to gtk.
Even if you're running gnome/e, you can still run konqueror right?

Better spend that time on improving xmms, writing themes, *documentation*, ect.

Re:Real monsters

[AussiePenguin]

Yea, u'd be wasting time by porting it to gtk.
Even if you're running gnome/e, you can still run konqueror right?

Yeah but you'd have to have QT and KDE libs installed.

AussiePenguin
Melbourne, Australia
ICQ 19255837

Re:Real monsters

[billstewart]

Sendmail is a mixed bag. It's big, ugly, and you can use its config files as a Turing machine if you're careful and as a Cuisinart if you're not. It's not really the right model for the mail handling jobs that need to be done in modern environments; it would make sense to learn the lessons we've learned from running sendmail and build a new system from the ground up - like qmail or postfix.


On the other hand, it's had ~15 years of exposure to the real world, and while Creeping Featurism doesn't usually fix fundamental problems, it does have a lot of features people want packed into its monolith, and Sendmail has had an immense of tuning to deal with a wide variety of mailing environments that the original authors couldn't have predicted in advance. I'd certainly pick it for scalability and stability over MSExchange (:-), and while I find it difficult to configure sendmail correctly for complicated applications, there are times it may still be the better choice over newer simpler mail systems.


One of the fundamental problems with sendmail needs operating system help. It's the need to use root permissions to listen on Port 25, and all the different security evils that come from running a huge program with setuid root. It doesn't need root permissions to deliver mail, even in traditional Unix time-sharing environments - System V and predecessors did just fine with setgid=mail providing write access to mailboxes with group mail. But because it's there, it tends to get abused, and the techniques for avoiding root permission aren't universal across operating systems (sigh - it's probably easier on NT :-)

Re:Real monsters

[Malik]

What do you expect from the people that produce redhat?

Re:Real monsters

[Anonymous Coward]

sendmail doesn't need root if you run it with inetd or an appropriate wrapper. 'Course the desireability of hooking a pig like sendmail to inetd is another can of fish :)

IIRC that's one reason sendmail's config files are unreadable. Back before hardware was fast, they had to be quickly digestable so the load and delay of starting sendmail by inetd were tolerable. So the focus was machine, not human, readability.

Re:Real monsters

[TheInternet]

Mozilla, while being a monster, could be wort sponsoring. Personally, I'd rather see a Gtk+ port of Konqueror, the KDE browser, or some funding of Mnemonic (anyone remember that effort?).

It sees silly to me at this point to invest in a Linux-only (or even Linux-centric browser). That's going to make it even harder for web developers/designers to support Linux. Mozilla is a much better bet. Plus an investment in Mozilla is an investment in portable multi-platform applications. The wacky ones like Konqueror or Mnemonic will almost certainly never find their way off of Linux. Both seem like a stop gap. History has tought us that browsers must be multiplatform to be useful.

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Real monsters

[mab]

We use qmail here and have not had to many problems. the only one is getting majordomo/major cool working

Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[weston]

OK, I'll try not to get TOO nervous about Red Hat vying for world domination. I'll repeat to myself: They are good members of the Open Source Community. They are _good_ members of the Open Source Community. They _are_ good...

But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it? Just speculation...

Re:Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[Raul Acevedo]

But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?

From the article:

"We were at a certain phase [early this year] where more people working on the project wouldn't have meant more progress," said Mitchell Baker, chief lizard wrangler for Mozilla, in Mountain View, Calif. "Now ... we're at a place where the number of developers who can effectively participate" can grow, Baker said.

So it seems like the time is ripe for some extra help, especially dedicated (i.e. full-time) help like the kind RedHat can hopefully provide.
----------

Re:Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[StenD]

One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.

As you indicated, that is the classical man-month tenet, more formally known as Brooks Law. As ESR pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this doesn't hold true when people are working on a problem that they find interesting with a communications medium at least as good as the Internet. In the world of closed source, Brooks Law holds true, because when you throw money at a project, and hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project. You're getting developers who are interested in making a living. However,

isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?

For the most part, yes, but how much are they able to work on it? Most developers have to work on problems they are not interested in in order to make a living, and work on their interests in their own time. By adding funding to Mozilla, Red Hat presumably intends for Mozilla to do what Red Hat has done with Linux - find people who already find the problem interesting and are working on it, and pay them to work on problems they find interesting. Yes, they may work on things other than what you're hoping to get, but if done properly, they will still find the problems you want solved interesting and will continue working on them as well.

Re:Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[billstewart]

Throwing developers at things doesn't always (often?) work. But a volunteer effort can really benefit from concentrated attention, and RedHat donating a few developers can provide some of that, and can also work on making sure _all_ the loose ends get worked on, which is difficult in a large volunteer project.

Re:Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes.

Invoke Raymond's law, and Brooks Law just disappears.

Can I have some of that magic cool-aide too?

Did Raymond himself wave an amulet over it?

Re:Musings (Man Months, Mozilla)...

[bero-rh]

hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project

True in parts - however, let's not forget which developers Red Hat is hiring.
You won't find any developer at Red Hat who hasn't been working on opensource projects privately before.

Just what the doctor ordered...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Marketing resources"?

Re:Just what the doctor ordered...

[Rombuu]

Hey, when you have a substandard product, you need all the marketing you can get.

Re:Just what the doctor ordered...

[um... Lucas]

There's no point in marketing a product that isn't marketable (yet).

How about getting Mozilla to work without the constant lockups? There seem to be a lot of "features" that completely crash it at this point.

Just as Windows is claimed to have lowered peoples expectations for stability in their OS's, Mozilla could suceed at lowering expectations in terms of software reliablity if it were heavily pushed on the public right now.

Re:Just what the doctor ordered...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about getting Mozilla to work without the constant lockups?

Maybe that is why all of those programmers are RIGHT NOW WORKING ON IT!

It's alpha right now ding-dong!

Re:Just what the doctor ordered...

[um... Lucas]

Since it's alpha, people shouldn't be suggesting that what it really needs is "marketing something-or-other". It needs development. That's the point I was trying to make.

Cash is nice...

[sugarman]

but the real boost will be from the engineering, and especially marketing. It took Linux as a whole quite some time to reach the critical mass that is needed to succeed in the marketplace. With some funding in these important projects, it will help to fight the marketing muscle that M$ currently is using to bosst it's proprietary alternatives.

Nice to see all around from Redhat.

Cool, but why Sendmail?

[Booker]

I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding... also, quite established. I think it'd be cool to see some investment in Qmail (www.qmail.org) or PostFix (www.postfix.org) which are touted as more secure options...

Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser! :)
----

Re:Cool, but why Sendmail?

[Trailer Trash]

I thought Sendmail, Inc. was already more or less corporate, with their own funding

And Netscape isn't? I agree that the money would be better spent on something other than Sendmail, but your position is extremely mixed to advocate Mozilla- another corporate product- and not Sendmail.

Great that they might help with Mozilla - that makes all the sense in the world. We NEED a browser! :)

No, we need choice. Mozilla has funding, I'd be interested in seeing the money spent a bit more wisely.

Re:Cool, but why Sendmail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Highly agreed. Postfix is WAY cooler than sendmail these days.

Free software?

[Trailer Trash]

What happened to the old "we only do free software" RedHat? Aren't there some new free [speech] browser projects that are more worthy of their cash than Mozilla? Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.

Re:Free software?

[Mike Shaver]

Since when is Mozilla not free software?

Re:Free software?

[kevinank]

The common thread between Sendmail, Mozilla, and even Cygnus, is that they all work with Windows.

The rationale goes like this; if you want to take over the desktop, you have to go about it in stages. First you get people used to the new tools they will need: the Cygnus port of the unix shell tools, the Netscape browser, the Apache server, the Sendmail server, etc. Then you point out how close they are to being able to change platforms altogether, and how much better their favorite tools run under Linux.

Anyway, the MPL is completely free, and the NPL is only unfree to the extent required for Navigator to continue to exist while Mozilla evolves.

I don't think Netscape were holding back, they just somewhat realistically realized that killing off Navigator to get Mozilla would be sort of stupid. The situation that Mozilla was in was similar to that of BSD when it was first released. They were still dependent on proprietary code for parts of the product.

The problem with the MPL isn't that it is not free, rather that some corporations refuse to contribute to it because it isn't as well understood as the GPL, and the cross licensing of patents is scary for a big company.

Re:Free software?

[Greg W.]

Nothing against Mozilla, I'd just like to see some choice in the Linux browser market, and I'd like to see a free product.

Mozilla is distributed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and/or the Netscape Public License (NPL), which even Richard Stallman says are free software.

(Of course, RMS prefers that you use the GPL instead of the NPL/MPL, but they are free licenses.)

Re:Free software?

[mrdisco99]

But... Mozilla IS free. Unless you're one of those who subscribes to the view that it's not free unless it's GPL. Other than Netscape and KDE, does Red Hat Linux have any non-free packages on its freely-distributable CD?

Re:Free software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you know? If it's not GNU, it's not free.

Re:Free software?

[Diggety_Dank]

KDE is free.

Why all the fuss about network things?

[slashdot-terminal]

Mozilla is only useful is you happen to have an IP address. Sendmail is also in the same boat. Why not develop something that could enhance the human condition? Something like AI or a program that can do extremely complex voice association. Maybe something that will have a small set of system resources? Networks and connections of the like that one would use sendmail for are usually bad for several reasons.

1. Failure. If connections on the network go down then you are screwed.

2. Expensive- not many people have money equivelent to that of small African countries and usually cannot afford the ability to do all the fancy stuff. Having a permanent connection is difficult.

3. Unnecessary- it is far better to have something on a machine you can control versus something you cannot.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[adimarco]

Hey slashdot-terminal, we wrestled earlier over pointless trivialities, why not continue? :)

Your posts to this thread all seem to center around the same idea, which seems to be "what use is all this network stuff?" (please correct me if i've missed the point)

1. Failure. If connections on the network go down then you are screwed.

The same argument applies to your power line, your phone line, your physical computer hardware, your water pipes, your gas line... Redundant connections solve this problem for those with gobs of $$, I personally deal with it by reading a book :)

2. Expensive- not many people have money equivelent to that of small African countries and
usually cannot afford the ability to do all the fancy stuff. Having a permanent connection is difficult.

As someone patiently (*patiently* i swear) waiting for ADSL or Cable connectivity, I can agree with you somewhat on this one. The Good Thing (tm) in my eyes, however, is that these technologies (and others) are becoming more and more prevalent for less and less money. In other words, they're becoming more accessable for your average Joe all the time. As always-on high-speed (maybe even wireless?) connectivity becomes more integrated into our daily lives, we'll (imho) really start to weigh in the benefits of this Information Age we're careening headlong into.

3. Unnecessary- it is far better to have something on a machine you can control versus something you cannot.

That's the one that prompted this whole reply :)

The way you termed it, I agree. I think you were really trying to say that it's better to store information locally than remotely. I *seriously* disagree with that proposition. Sometimes it's much better to store your data remotely, as it allows you to access said data from any network conected point. This enabling of one to many (and many to one, and many to many, and one to one, for that matter) is what makes networking really worth it. Look at slashdot if you need proof...

Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[slashdot-terminal]

Well I am so glad you find my dissertation length posts intriguing!

The same argument applies to your power line, your phone line, your physical computer hardware, your water pipes, your gas line... Redundant connections solve this problem for those with gobs of $$, I personally deal with it by
reading a book :)

Well I think that can be said of even life itself however I have had massive problems with networks in the past. If we measured the ammount of reliability of various services we would see that networks are far less reliable than say water or even electricity.

As someone patiently (*patiently* i swear) waiting for ADSL or Cable connectivity, I can agree with you somewhat on this one. The Good Thing (tm) in my eyes, however, is that these technologies (and others) are becoming more
and more prevalent for less and less money. In other words, they're becoming more accessable for your average Joe all the time. As always-on high-speed (maybe even wireless?) connectivity becomes more integrated into our daily
lives, we'll (imho) really start to weigh in the benefits of this Information Age we're careening headlong into.

I spend several hours a day on the net connecting via wireless would put me into debtor's prison in no time. Until connections are quite cheap (say maybe the cost of caller id or maybe abotu ~$5/month ) I won't be running to their doors.

That's the one that prompted this whole reply :)

The way you termed it, I agree. I think you were really trying to say that it's better to store information locally than remotely. I *seriously* disagree with that proposition. Sometimes it's much better to store your data remotely, as it
allows you to access said data from any network conected point. This enabling of one to many (and many to one, and many to many, and one to one, for that matter) is what makes networking really worth it. Look at slashdot if you
need proof...

Storing information remotely requires a large ammount of money. Suppose you were to price various web hosting services and such for the cost of all your personal games/music/term papers/books /etc and put all of it on the web? I don't know of many services that allow for 3 Tb worth of data to be put online do you? I have had personal experience with slashdot not being avaible or timely or even speedy for quite a while. I have to log in twice to post articles to any discussion because there is something wrong with the site's recognition of my login or perhaps my browser (Netscape Communicator 4.5) I have had my files deleated from various accounts. Had shell access suddenly dissapear because the service decided to be anal with their customers. In short networking is for the aristocrats. For example what happens if I want to connect to the internet at 300bps or lower? Why can't the modem at the ISP simply take the connection and allow me to give up some of the possible 53kps to allow me to connect? If they get paid the same what do they care? I know of no real ISP that would do this for anyone.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[Hobbex]

What the fuck good are computers anyways? They are prone to failures, expensive, and wholly unnecessary. Why the fuck are they developing anything for computers? Whats the point with that?

Why not develope some new flavours of beer instead. Computers are just bad anyways.

Are you seriously arguing that they ought not develop network apps because networks sometimes fail are too expensive for some? Is this a joke that I didn't get? Have you checked your perscriptions?


-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[slashdot-terminal]

What the fuck good are computers anyways? They are prone to failures, expensive, and wholly unnecessary. Why the fuck are they developing anything for computers? Whats the point with that?

They are useful but networks are not.

Why not develope some new flavours of beer instead. Computers are just bad anyways.

I don't know how people can prattle on about beer. Beer and other alchol based beveages are known to cause damage to critical higher reasoning areas of the brain. Plus flavored beer could just as easily be done with a minimum of effort.

Are you seriously arguing that they ought not develop network apps because networks sometimes fail are too expensive for some? Is this a joke that I didn't get? Have you checked your perscriptions?

I got the impression that that's was all that people cared about after reading freshmeat for several months. Basically all of the stuff was network centric and had little redeaming value. It seemed like people didn't care about the undering quality of the information but that they could shuttle it around in strange and unusual ways. Why not develop an app that uses fractal enhancements to allow for an arbitrary finite resolution enhancement to photos? I saw this on some documentary on fractals but have as of yet not see hide nor hare of in linux. The rearrangement of priorities into things that are useless or not as important (shuttling things around) than the quality of the stuff that is being moved (ideas)

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[Greg W.]

If we measured the ammount of reliability of various services we would see that networks are far less reliable than say water or even electricity.

And this has what to do with Red Hat? Do you think RHAT should be investing in sewers? What's your point?

Storing information remotely requires a large ammount of money.

Depends on what you're storing.

[...] all your personal games/music/term papers/books /etc and put all of it on the web?

Why would you want to do this? Sheer geek factor? OK, let's assume you have some motive....

It would be the height of lunacy to store all this information on the existing "web hosting" sites. They're not scaled for it. Either you'd want to do it yourself, or you'd want a full data storage site -- not a "web hosting" site, that's for small amounts of data.

If you were going to do it yourself, you'd need a whole bunch of disk drives (RAID 4 or RAID 5 preferably), and enough computers (or equivalent devices, like NetApp NFS toasters) to control them. You'd probably want some serious UPSes, or maybe a generator. (Or both.) And most importantly, you'd need a network capable of getting the data from the storage farm to the computers that want to use it. If you want to use it from multiple sites, then you'll need a WAN, or you could use the Internet (if you have a permanent connection). If you want to use it from anywhere then you'll need to connect it to the Internet. At that point, you have just become a data warehouse. So why not throw in a few more TB of storage and offer service to others to help recoup your costs?

And what does this have to do with RHAT?

I have had personal experience with slashdot not being avaible or timely or even speedy for quite a while.

... and therefore Red Hat should not invest in Mozilla or Sendmail? Are you just whining to hear yourself whine?

In short networking is for the aristocrats.

No, it's accessible to even lower middle-class people in the USA. Even some of the poor can get online if they're clever enough to use the local public libraries.

Do you think RHAT should invest in something that will improve the lives of the poor? Well, that's really noble, but it's a lousy business model. The poor don't have much disposable discretionary income to throw at RHAT.

For example what happens if I want to connect to the internet at 300bps or lower?

I don't think I could find a 300 baud modem if I tried. I've got an old 1200 baud at home, but it's broken. I've got a working 2400 baud....

Why can't the modem at the ISP simply take the connection and allow me to give up some of the possible 53kps to allow me to connect?

I don't know of any reason why this wouldn't work, but I must admit I haven't actually tried it (see above), and my theoretical background in analog/digital conversion is a bit lacking. Have you actually tried this? What problems did you encounter?

Seriously, if you can afford $120 - $240 USD a year (depending on where you live) for a dialup connection, you can afford at least a 14.4kbps modem. And I know a 14.4kbps modem will work with my ISP, because I've done it. (I still have the 14.4kbps modem, too. I'd estimate its resale value at about $5 USD -- not worth the effort it would take to find a buyer.)

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[slashdot-terminal]

And this has what to do with Red Hat? Do you think RHAT should be investing in sewers? What's your point?


This was relating to the nature or scale of reliability in regards networks with which Red Hat is taking advantage of with the apps that it is supporting finicially.


Depends on what you're storing.


I agree here

Why would you want to do this? Sheer geek factor? OK, let's assume you have some motive....

It would be the height of lunacy to store all this information on the existing "web hosting" sites. They're not scaled for it. Either you'd want to do it yourself, or you'd want a full data storage site -- not a "web hosting" site, that's for
small amounts of data.

If you were going to do it yourself, you'd need a whole bunch of disk drives (RAID 4 or RAID 5 preferably), and enough computers (or equivalent devices, like NetApp NFS toasters) to control them. You'd probably want some
serious UPSes, or maybe a generator. (Or both.) And most importantly, you'd need a network capable of getting the data from the storage farm to the computers that want to use it. If you want to use it from multiple sites, then you'll
need a WAN, or you could use the Internet (if you have a permanent connection). If you want to use it from anywhere then you'll need to connect it to the Internet. At that point, you have just become a data warehouse. So why not
throw in a few more TB of storage and offer service to others to help recoup your costs?

And what does this have to do with RHAT?

They create the lust for network usage. I have received the impression that the internet is the be all and the end all of applications. With talk of everything including toasters having IPs that means that the internet will be everywhere: at least for the chosen few.

... and therefore Red Hat should not invest in Mozilla or Sendmail? Are you just whining to hear yourself whine?


Whine only to the extent that it is true. Having say daily digests of slashdot stories would be a help. Or perhaps have digests of the comments after they are archived so that individuals can persue them. Maybe a mirror that is updated very frequently with a large connection. If people are already caught headlong into the frenzy of network activity why not go all the way with it. Mozilla is a browser and sendmail is a mail transport agent that. This illustrates that networks are inefficient with regard to the way they are used and deployed. If more of the resources would be distributed more evenly then we could all be able to bennifit.

No, it's accessible to even lower middle-class people in the USA. Even some of the poor can get online if they're clever enough to use the local public libraries.

Do you think RHAT should invest in something that will improve the lives of the poor? Well, that's really noble, but it's a lousy business model. The poor don't have much disposable discretionary income to throw at RHAT.

Yes it is noble but if I support a controlling regime and allow for people to constantly be put down am I doing the right thing. I have never been able to run a red hat anything due to shortsightedness on their part and a general lack of organization. You should be able to install from floppies. As far as "the business of America is business" concept I loathe it. People who are technically inclined should not be concerned with business practices and such. It's boring, loathesome, irritating, and non productive for the general welfare of man kind. In 10,000 years people will look back and look at our civilization and not see a bunch of worthless business oriented things they will see great monuments, works of art; testaments of the human ability to survive and live without pain and suffering. I say that groups like Debian are a great deal better since they actually give a crap about my existince.

I don't think I could find a 300 baud modem if I tried. I've got an old 1200 baud at home, but it's broken. I've got a working 2400 baud....


I have a 2400 one as well 300 baud can also be set from software angle. The point is that everything should be backwards compatable with almost everything else. Spending away your existence is a really bad thing.

I don't know of any reason why this wouldn't work, but I must admit I haven't actually tried it (see above), and my theoretical background in analog/digital conversion is a bit lacking. Have you actually tried this? What problems did
you encounter?

Seriously, if you can afford $120 - $240 USD a year (depending on where you live) for a dialup connection, you can afford at least a 14.4kbps modem. And I know a 14.4kbps modem will work with my ISP, because I've done it. (I
still have the 14.4kbps modem, too. I'd estimate its resale value at about $5 USD -- not worth the effort it would take to find a buyer.)


Well from what I have tried I don't think I can. I have tried to connect to various services at a considerably lower speed than what they have as connection speed and it fails. It seems like they want to force you to connect faster. 56k modems seem to be forced down people's collective throats. Shortly after I try to connect to services like this one of two things will happen:
1. They will connect then disconnect me immediately.

2. Not connect after making the initial connection tone and realizing that it must be a 300 or a 2400 or some such.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[mistabobdobalina]

i hate to flame and i've already gotten one zero today but goddammit slashdot-terminal you are one stupid individual. hello? network apps? you read slashdot right? no network, no slashdot. and no pr0n, or free linux downloads. in fact no network, and you might even have to talk to a human being!!!!

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[Hobbex]

Um, if you had understood one shit about the whole Open Source movement, you would not be here telling other people that they ought to write the sort of software you want. If you want this, write it yourself.

Don't go around saying people shouldn't be developing perfectly good applications. Connectivity is one of the most important things that has happened to mankind lately, and definetly the most important part of computers. Until my computer became part of the Internet it was of little interest to me, now it is the most important tool I have. There are other valid applications of computers (as a student of Scientific Computing, I should know), and if you want the sort of tools you discuss just write them.

consider: how important is a fractal enhancer to photos in my life, how important are my browser and mailer?

-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you say that computer networks aren't useful? Being able to communicate and share files with my colleagues around the world is incredibly useful to me. Just because a technology is overhyped, overcommercialized, or not equitably deployed (all of which I grant you) doesn't make it worthless.

Re:Why all the fuss about network things?

[arielb]

with ipv6, every cell in your body can have its own IP address :)

Re:RED$AT WILL BUY MOZILLA AND SENDMAIL

[slashdot-terminal]

Actually it hasn't fallen yet my friend.

Initscripts

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be more excited if I read that they were investing more engineering in getting their distro debugged. Criminy is 6.1 buggy!

Re:Initscripts

[slashdot-terminal]

Exactly how is red hat broken? I haven't had the time or the HD space to play with it. Seems that if people are investing in it it can't be too bad. Can it? Why would a company risk their reputation on something that has a bad time working correctly? And this comes from an operating system that is already a minority in the OS market and one that touts stability? If this is the case they could give linux a bad name.

Good move

[mathematician]

(Do I get first post?)

I am really glad that RedHat is going to invest a lot of effort in Mozilla. I think that Microsoft were very wise when they realised how important the browser is. I think it is key to being a successful OS. I am glad that RedHat will work to make Mozilla successful. I think that the success of Mozilla (or some other browser) is very important if Linux is going to succeed in the desktop market.

Re:Good move

[slashdot-terminal]

No.

Secondly I think that it can't be the browser that makes a OS good. If I have an OS that does nothing but insult the user with random insults and BSOD's every 3 minutes but has a great browser that has built in AI can make or break the OS in terms of customer favor.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

he didn't say that a browser made a good OS. he said that a good browser was necessary for a _successful_ OS.

RedHat Mozilla

[Raven667]

Maybe, if RHAT makes a RedHat branded Mozilla broswer, this will show, once and for all, that Mozilla != Netscape. Mozilla is not even the same codebase as the Navigator series of browsers. Maybe RH will invest in some integration of the Mozilla HTML/XML libraries into Gnome (via a wrapper or some such). Fun fun fun!

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[Unknwn]

Actually, there are already plans to turn Mozilla into a Bonobo component, which means a web browser could be easily embedded in any application.

--
Jeremy Katz

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[n-baxley]

Forgive me if I misunderstood you, are you talking about integrating the browser with the operating system? That sounds an awful lot like something that someone else we know did recently. Of course, since this is open source, everyone will play nice and do what is in the best interest of the community. These companies don't really care about the money. They're in it for the good of the community. Please people, if RedHat is courting Mozilla and Sendmail, there is a business purpose behind it. And if I were them, I'd be very careful about what get's integrated into my OS. Nate

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[Raven667]

I suppose that depends on your definition of "Operating System". RedHat could be considered "integrated" if they include Mozilla with their distro, but only if you consider the entire CD, including Apache, Samba, MySQL, Gnome/KDE, X, etc as part of the OS. More likely you consider the OS as the kernel and the barest minimum of utilities (basicly /bin:/sbin) than no.

Really they (RH & MS) are completely dissimilar organizations with differing morals. RH would do well to include a standards compliant, open source, free (as in speach as well as beer) browser into their desktop environment. We have waited too long for browser tech to catch up with the HTML standard (incl. DOM/CSS/XML/ECMAScript/Java). Now we can build websites with all the power and be sure that the client will be able to use them. Lets not start over and go back to the dark ages when even a table wouldn't render properly and people actually used Frames(!).

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[bero-rh]

Part of the difference is that by including a well-working version of Mozilla, Red Hat in no way forces anyone to use Mozilla instead of, for example, Konqueror or Opera, the way Microsoft did.
Just shipping Internet Explorer as an optional extra app with Windows 98 wouldn't have been that bad.

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[n-baxley]

I'm not usually a big MS supporter, quite the opposite, but I fail to see the difference between MS throwing IE in with 95 and RH throwing Mozilla in, especially when RH has a financial interest in them.

Really they (RH & MS) are completely dissimilar organizations with differing morals.
What! Why is that just because a company is Open Source, they are assumed to have high morals? Every company is in business to make money. Period. It would be greate if there were companies that were around just to help people and make things fun. But that's not business, that's philanthropy (sp?). I'm not saying RH is the next evil empire, but let's be careful how far we praise them.

Nate

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[C.Lee]

>I'm not usually a big MS supporter, quite the opposite, but I fail to >see the difference between MS throwing IE in with 95 and RH throwing >Mozilla in, especially when RH has a financial interest in them.

Can you say the *.rpm concept? Of course paid Microsoft Astrotufers like yourself aren't familar with software that can totally removed from a system with little or no fuss if you don't like it.

Re:RedHat Mozilla

[mab]

Hmm I wish they did include MySQL and suport for it in apache

at the moment you have to edit the SPEC file to get php for MySQL

Re:cool!

[slashdot-terminal]

No it just helps out the elite of the world who already have a strangle hold on us anyway. I couldn't think of a worse thing than to empower people with treasures they are not prepared to use or use properly.

What about the server market?

[costas]

If the last moves by RH (Cygnus, Mozilla) mean that RH is focusing on the desktop --which is Linux's weak point-- doesn't that mean that they're might be an opening for someone else to tackle the server market?

And since, that's where Linux's current strengths lie (cheap server boxes), doesnt that leave a window for RH's rivals to catch up? (I am thinking TurboLinux)...

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Re:What about the server market?

[vilvoy]

I think diversity and competition ar the greatest strengths in the Linux market. That this move by Red Hat does not close the door for competitors is just that much more reason to admire them for it. Their funding of these projects doesn't keep them from being used with competing distributions. And helping Sendmail certainly doesn't look like they've forgotten about servers. I wish them success, but not so much that competing products can't challenge them.

--
Peace,
vilvoy

Why Sendmail?

[whm]

Just wondering, does everybody use Sendmail?

We use qmail, and we've been very pleased with the results.

Are there reasons why people would use Sendmail over qmail? Are there reasons why people would use qmail over Sendmail?

Just interested :>

Thanks.

Re:Why Sendmail?

[proberts]

Lots of people use Sendmail. It's the default MTA for most *nixes. Personally, I prefer postfix:


www.postfix.org


It's mostly sendmail compatible, faster than most other MTAs, easy to configure, designed to be secure, and doesn't have the interaction problems that qmail sometimes does with other software. Sendmail is still the most flexible MTA on the planet, and for some people running legacy system gateways, there isn't a good alternative.

It's also easy for vendors to add sendmail (or postfix) to their OS distributions, qmail's license isn't favorable to 3rd parties.

Sendmail is the best "lowest common denominator" MTA. Postfix's sendmail compatibility program attempts to provide the base functionality necessary for _most_ external programs to work. Qmail doesn't even pretend to try to be sendmail compatible. Some people think that's an advantage, others don't. Because sendmail is monolithic, it can do things easily that modular mailers like qmail and postfix can't.

Paul

Re:Why Sendmail?

[OnlyNou]

it's debian compliant. ; )

i've found sendmail easy to configure. there's great info at sendmail.org and in my debian distro, i just add a few lines to the .mc file and type make.

qmail is suppose to be faster though.

if it aint broke, i'm not fixing it.

Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[cbraescu]

Redhat targets two different competitors: Microsoft and the KDE camp. With a working browser they can hit hard not only Microsoft's Internet Explorer ever-growing desktop dominance but also the fast-pacing browser component from KDE called Konqueror. Thus they diferentiate themselves against both types of competition (dominant player and fast-moving pretender). The Sendmail affair is helping Red Hat convince corporations their consulting is broad, not only RedHat Linux itself but also critical corporate applications like e-mail. To me, Redhat marketing plan is A grade until now.

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too late. Netscape is on their asses trying to create a good browser, while MS already has one. Why wait?

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Foogle]

That's the stupidest thing I've read all day. How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's??? Seriously, it's part of their distro and they have nothing to gain by harming it. Moreover, they couldn't harm it even if they wanted to: It's Open Sourced, they don't exactly need to make sales.

RedHat is investing into Mozilla so that they'll get a great browser for their flagship product, not to hurt Konquerer. I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. Where do people like you come from, anyway??

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[cbraescu]

(How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's???) RedHat is certainly favouring Gnome; KDE is favourite of Caldera and Corel. Thus favouring anything else than KDE/Konqueror makes sense to RedHat, since it is disadvantage of their main Linux competitors. (I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. ) Well, I doubt. The more Netscape, the less Konqueror. The less Konqueror, the less Caldera or Corel. (Where do people like you come from, anyway??) Romania, Estern Europe. Do you?

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[cbraescu]

(How the heck can you call KDE a competitor of RedHat's???) RedHat is certainly favouring Gnome; KDE is favourite of Caldera and Corel. Thus favouring anything else than KDE/Konqueror makes sense to RedHat, since it is disadvantage of their main Linux competitors. (I'm sure RedHat wants Konquerer to suceed just as much. ) Well, I doubt. The more Netscape, the less Konqueror. The less Konqueror, the less Caldera or Corel. (Where do people like you come from, anyway??) Romania, Eastern Europe. Do you?

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Foogle]

No, I am from Massachusetts actually :-)

This is just as dumb as the first post. Sometimes you people get a little too into this whole KDE vs. Gnome war. It's not really a competition.

Do you think RedHat wants KDE to fail? Not a chance. That's crazy. They might want to see Corel/Caldera's distros go under, but not at the cost of a very popular window manager. Moreover, if KDE did miraculously disappear, Corel & Caldera could just pick up Gnome. Wouldn't cost them anything and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on RedHat.

You really don't get the whole "Open Source" idea, do you? It's not about competition. It's about good software.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Nevyn]

Actually, trying not to flame I do think that RedHat would like KDE to die (or lat least they wouldn't mind if it did).
Mainly because then all the KDE developers would move to Gtk+, but also because when Corel/Caldera had to change to GNOME it would be a big indication that RedHat knew what was going on and they didn't.

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Midnight Coder]

Your argument doesn't just apply to Caldera but also to Mandrake and SUSE. Redhats 55% of the market claim actually includes sales of the Mandrake distribution (which is now the best selling distribution in the US). Globally SUSE makes more revenue than Redhat, that's not just profit but revenue.

Distributions changing their default GUI to GNOME would be more than just an indication that RedHat knew better it would mean a large part of the GUI for these distributions would change considerably annoying customers and increasing tech support costs.

Despite this Redhat does not act as if it would like KDE to die.

Redhat has changed its KDE position from confrontational (with GNOME support) to neutral (see how quickly Bob apologized to the KDE developers after the RMS/Linux debacle, and notice the improved KDE support in RHL).

Redhat did take an anti-KDE stance with RH 6 and it has hurt them, allowing Mandrake to eat into their market share with superior KDE support.

The situation is a complicated and uncertain one.

Will Borland come out with a linux product with GTK or QT support?

Will Redhat come out with an IDE with GTK support via its Cygnus takeover?

Will a linux distributor like SUSE or Caldera start supporting kdevelop creating a professional edition with proprietary add ons?

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[bero-rh]

Favoring anything else than KDE/Konqueror makes sense to Red Hat, since it is disadvantage of their main Linux competitors

Not quite. KDE is a viable desktop environment, and Red Hat can definitely use that. Just because other Linux distributors are using it doesn't mean it's a bad thing for Red Hat.

Also, Red Hat has no interest whatsoever in getting rid of other Linux distributors if they're playing by the rules - their contributions to the OS are as useful to us as our contributions are to them.

Re:Excelent anti-MS and anti-KDE marketing plan!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I am from Massachusetts actually :-)

And as we all know, Massachusetts is a small African kingdom located in between Zambia, Mocambique and Sulewai.

Uh, ok, maybe not, but I find it pretty funny that the previous guy even explained what part of which continent his country was located in, and you somehow expect everyone to know that M. is part of the US...

-- Aldain, Halland (now what country could Halland be part of?).

If true

[Anonymous Coward]

this would be spectacular wonderful excellent news. anyone who read tim o'reilly's comments on the pending m$ server war would note that this is possibly the most astute move rhat could make...

Good news for a change

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, just like the subject sais. Good news.
No, not that sendmail and mozilla are supported by RH (which is also good) but that money is channeld back to the open source community that is essentially the source of the product RH sells.
The majority of open source programmers would and will contribute source without payment but it is always nice to have ones work acknowleged.

I wonder how exactly do they plan to do that?
Or did I miss something in that article?

Ciao, Peter (Who really hopes this to be his last post as AC)

Re:Why Sendmail? Exim

[hattig]

I find Exim to be an excellent MTA. It is easy to set up, yet very powerful, and it works like a dream.

Sendmail is just a large, crufty piece of software with a lot of security holes. I know that a lot of time has been spent on it to fix these problems, but I think Red Hats money would be better spent on further developing the other MTAs out there which are better, such as Exim and qmail.

Still, any investment is better than no investment I suppose. I just dread to think what Red Hat is going to do with the results, are they going to be 'Red Hat-ised'?

What about Modern Mailers?

[Outlyer]

I have to agree with some of the other postings here. Why sendmail? It's high profile, that I understand, but it's a huge dinosaur with plenty of legacy code and various issues too numerous to mention. There are modern mailers like postfix and exim, which are both GPLed, and provide a fast, stable alternative. I also like qmail, but it has a weird license which makes modifications a little difficult (author has to approve all of them, which could take a millenia if RedHat puts its people behind it.)

Re:What about Modern Mailers?

[Foogle]

Well there's nothing that restricts the Sendmail people from ripping out all that "legacy code" and reworking Sendmail in the next version (or the next couple of versions). The only thing stopping them is the amount of effort it would take. With an investment from RedHat, that effort becomes a little easier to fund.

Having said that, I think RedHat probably could have found a more worthwhile project to shell out cash to. Oh well, it's their money, not mine :-)

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

RedHat's portal

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat's site is set to become the portal for Linux. Clue bat for the clueless:
Step 1. Make the site the focal point for the gazillons of Red Hat CD's out there.
Step 2. Make the site Corporate Friendly.
Step 3. Point the browser on Red Hat at the Red Hat portal. Uh? No Browser...
Step 4. Take a failing browser project, Mozilla, kick some life into it, and then point it at the Red Hat Portal.
Step 5. Introduce Red Hat Instant Messanger for AOL users and turn that user base into the Red Hat Linux users. Oh, sorry, Linux users ;-p
Step 6. Purchase Corel. Realise that its a waste of money
Step 7. Sack those responsible for purchasing Corel.
Step 8. Purchase Sun. Think I'm kidding?

It might be Open Source, but the vast unwashed masses outside the rarified confines of /. dont know what source code is let alone care about it. Red Hat get the vast majority of market share and give out the source code to the majority of people who dont want it. Yeah, anyone can use the source code, but the vast Linux market is already pointing at Red Hat.

/. is obsessed with Open Source. Red Hat are obsessed with market share for Red Hat. Open Source is merely one of many ways to get there. And get there they surely will

10 years ago we loved to beat on IBM.
Today its fashionable to beat on Microsoft.
10 years from now, after the DoJ inquest into how Red Hat squished all the competition by releasing source code, we will beat on Red Hat.

Re:RedHat's portal

[um... Lucas]

You were making sense up until #6, 7 and 8.

Everyone loves to hate Corel, forgetting that they've delivered the best Word Processor available for Linux (GUIed, i mean).

I don't even think that Corel is buyable at this point, unless they WANT to be aquired. They do have a poison pill, which prevented Adobe from seriously considering purchasing them a few years back.

And lastly, Red Hat buying Sun???? Hello? We're on Planet EARTH... Redhat's not buying Sun, today tomorrow or 5 years from now. I'd hate to see that occur, and i can't imagine how anyone could think that would be beneficial to anybody, anywhere. I won't rant, though :)

The inverse of Brook's Law is not true

[DragonHawk]

One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it...

Very true, but on the other hand, a lack of cash and developers will not make a project succeed. If there are those would like to work on Mozilla full time, but need a job to feed their families, maybe this will enable them to do both.

sendmail

[mattc]

I agree w/ not supporting sendmail. What a piece of junk. Why anyone would want to sponsor it is beyond me. IMO, sendmail represents some of the WORST parts of unix -- difficult configuration, poor design. As for Postfix, I think it has some sort of strange license which might disqualify it as being considered 'free' software.

Instead of sendmail, they should sponsor KDE or Gnome (or both!) or how about a project to modernize printing on Unix.

Re:sendmail

[Larry L]

Youre completely right.
Work on a new unix acl system might be good too.

Re:sendmail

[bmetzler]

Instead of sendmail, they should sponsor KDE or Gnome (or both!) or how about a project to modernize printing on Unix.

Actually, Red Hat already actively develop's Gnome.

-Brent
--

Re:sendmail

[orabidoo]

err, GNOME doesn't include a replacement for sendmail. Postfix and Qmail (and others) are replacements for sendmail; unfortunately Qmail's author refuses to use an open-source compliant license, so it's out for RedHat. But Postfix would be a much better default than Sendmail; I wish they would use it as default MTA in their distribution, instead of doing political moves like collaborating with Sendmail, Inc.

as for Mozilla, well, whatever can help bring it to usability soon, will be good.

Fewer strings than from AOL, I hope

[EisPick]

It's great to see Mozilla acquire a new "senior partner" in addition to AOL.

When you look at the "improvements" to Communicator 4.x since AOL's acquisition of Netscape, you get the notion that AOL's only interest in the browser has been to market their "branded" service. Have you noticed there's no way to opt out of AIM in the 4.7 install (for Windows, at least)?

Yeah, I know, AOL/Netscape has eleventy-one developers dedicated to Mozilla, and if it weren't for them there'd be no Mozilla. But given their business model, it's hard to see how AOL will be able to justify that level of effort long term -- other than for adding bogus "enhancements" designed to herd sheep into their $23/month service.

Red Hat's business model is based on building a strong base of Open-Source apps, so it's easier for me to see them keeping Mozilla alive and relevant for the long term.

Let's hope it's not too late.

Re:Fewer strings than from AOL, I hope

[slashdot-terminal]

you could just choose to delete the instant messenger

Re:Fewer strings than from AOL, I hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape latest and greatest has it's own "shop" button, no doubt an AOL feature.

Re:I see it now....

[slashdot-terminal]

The starting homepage? Easy enough to change just go into the options and change it to
http://www.debian.org *grin*

Just comment that portion of the code out and recompile.

Just ignore the logo. You might even be able to change. You can change the bios image on your computer to be something linux tux.

See above

Ok a little bulky but with the trends being that people buy new computers why should this matter. I have brought this to the attention of the readership many, many, many time about themes of backwards compatability and the need to keep old hardware truely alive but no one seems to care. Seems that people cry wolf when even their high end mainframes are suffering? Is that it?

well, not really

[Anonymous Coward]

MS does this sort of thing all the time, just not usually with open source projects. That doesn't make them nice. For that matter, MS funds open source perl development on Windows.

but would Sun ignore that?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, would Sun let that pass, or would they feel the need to defend themselves? Let's not forget that UNIX is the competitor that would get hit first if RedHat becomes aggressive. Microsoft won't be an issue for Linux and RedHat until UNIX is already dead, and Sun is the prime target in that space. I wonder when Linux/Java developers will start running into roadblocks?

Re:but would Sun ignore that?

[bmetzler]

Let's not forget that UNIX is the competitor that would get hit first if RedHat becomes aggressive.

How can you say that? Solaris, and all the other Unix' for that matter are focused on doing things that Linux doesn't do well. Things that W2K doesn't do well in either, for that matter.

I don't know of anyone who *needs* Solaris, who would be interested in replacing it with Linux. Linux does what it does, and what it does it does well, but it doesn't do what Solaris does.

Solaris and Linux, or any Unix and Linux complement each other. Consider what Compaq is doing with Linux and Tru64. That is the place for Linux.

You are wrong. Linux will be used in Small Networks. Solaris hasn't been designed for that. NT has. Linux will be used as desktops. Solaris hasn't been designed for that. NT has. Consider small internet services. NT? Solaris?

What is Microsoft's strength? Providing low-cost solutions for commodity solutions. People use Microsoft because it's the cheapest. People don't use Solaris because it's the cheapest solution. They use Solaris because it is powerful and reliable. Think 64 cpu systems, and huge RAID's.

Linux on the other hand is extremely inexpensive, compared to Solaris, and even NT, and extremely well supported. It does all the small stuff well, and inexpensively. But it doesn't do the things that Solaris does well, and probably won't for a long time, and probably doesn't need too. But it does what NT does extremely well.

Microsoft won't be an issue for Linux and RedHat until UNIX is already dead, and Sun is the prime target in that space.

Trust me, before Linux takes any significant marketshare from Solaris, Microsoft's market share will be just a dream of Gates.

-Brent
--

The Red Baron Phoenix Rises from the Ashes

[grahamkg]

For anyone who's been using Red Hat for awhile (since v4.1 for me), this is a natural. The older versions had their own browser, Red Baron. It wasn't great, but considering the other alternative browsers at the time, it worked pretty well.

Now Red Hat can gun against Microsoft and kick some Redmond butt. YES!!!!!!!

This is excellent news. Go GNU/Linux, Go Red Hat!

Graham

Re:The Red Baron Phoenix Rises from the Ashes

[Anonymous Coward]

since when is redhat gnu/linux, don't you mean debian?

Is Mozilla GPLed?

[gatekeeper-eu]

Is Mozilla GPLed, does it matter?

Re:Is Mozilla GPLed?

[Johan Jonasson]

No it's not, but it is under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and the Netscape Public License (NPL). Although it's not GPL, both means free software as far as I can tell.

Mozilla is lean

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe should do some research before posting... One of the key points of the Mozilla overhaul that people keep whining about because it took so long was to produce a browser that provides all the major web browsing features, mailer, etc. yet fits on a single floppy and uses minimal RAM. The KDE browser is years behind and far fewer people with any web browser design experience on the project. Not to mention the fact that it's got far less support from developers and almost no press.

Just check RHAT stock price...

[svallarian]

Just look at Red Hat's stock price today ($250 a share!!) It's no wonder they can afford to spend as much as they want.

WHOO HOO!!!!

[CmdrPinkTaco]

I think that I was one of the many skeptics that were around when I found out that Red Hat was going public. As many people thought (my self being one of them), there was a genuine fear that Red Hat was in it purely for the sake of making LOTS of money. I think that Red Hat is making some good moves that are very true to the heart of the Open Source / Free Software movement. While simply throwing money at a problem / issue is not always the solution, I think that Red Hat is doing more than just that. They are not only providing monetary incentives for people to program in OSS projects, but they are spawning more resources. As one of the earlier posts mentioned, as long as they don't make it "Red Hat centric" I think that the benefit of having Red Hat on the side of the OSS/FS could be astronomical. There is definately some potential there. This is a move that I see as very encouraging. It also shows me that Red Hat is not out there to assimilate the market place, but to make it better.
----------------------------------------- ---

keep dreaming!

[CrudPuppy]

i love linux, don't get me wrong, but it has a LONG way to go before it can displace Sun or any other big UNIX vendor.

MS is a much easier target because its software and OS is so buggy and bloated and crappy...but Sun??

call me when linux can give me the same performance as Solaris on my 64 cpu E10k's.

Re:keep dreaming!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, linux is no threat to the high end, but have you priced an ultra 5 lately? WTF would I pay a lot more for one of those when I could get a AMD workstation for a lot less that is faster?

Of course, the real victim of Linux is SCO. and good riddance to them.

Re:keep dreaming!

[Znork]

Actually, call me when Solaris gets Backspace correct when you've just installed it, when they fix the syslog bugs so you dont have to rotate logs every 5 minutes if they grow fast, and when they start shipping things like sendmail and bind from this decade (Ok, Solaris 7 is a tad more recent, but they are sloooow) at least, etc etc etc etc etc. Solaris is scalable but it stinks in a lot of ways.

Sun had better get their act together or I can name a number of low to mid range servers that are gonna buy it when the next replacement round comes.

Modern is good, but there's a legacy to support

[Christopher B. Brown]

I've asked RHAT folk about why they don't consider something like Postfix, SMAIL, or the likes. I'm using Postfix, and found it a remarkably easy install.

The problem with a transition is that there's a considerable body of anti-spam code that has been specifically written for Sendmail but not for the other mailers.

RHAT adopted some of the antispam code, and has promoted it to the body of users of Red Hat Linux.

Unfortunately for the notion of moving to a newer MTA, there is both:

• A forcible necessity to continue supporting sites that want to use Sendmail;
• A necessity to support the same antispam functionality they have already been supporting;
• The cost of supporting two MTA's at the same time.

Red Hat buying Sun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Simple;
1. All that hardware to run Red Hat.
2. Established corporate awareness and market/mind share. Why convert them to Linux when you can BUY THEM (The Microsoft Way).
3. Solaris. Red Hat would become UNIX.
4. All the other neat technology licences/patents Sun own could be Opened up.

We are on Planet Earth. Stranger things have happened. Red Hat's investors expect a return on the share value. Selling $80 CD sets (they cost $8-9 to manufacture) doesnt cut it

sendmail is not that bad, qmail is not that great

[Tim Pierce]

Sendmail is really not a bad choice. If you can get over your fear of the sendmail.cf language, it's very servicable on a modern machine.

Sendmail's "insecurity" is largely a myth at this point. I do not recall seeing a root exploit since Sendmail-8.8, which was about three years ago. While qmail and Postfix can legitimately brag about being designed for security from the ground up, the sendmail team has done a pretty good cleanup job.

Doubting Thomases should consider that OpenBSD, the famously "ultra-secure" operating system, ships with sendmail, not qmail. How many people think that Theo de Raadt would put up with shipping software that has known exploits?

We use sendmail to run one of the largest mailing list sites in the world. My experiments with qmail were pretty hideous; qmail has serious problems out of the box with high-volume delivery. The mail queue backed up by several thousand messages, and one big list actually caused the server to crash. (I am told that there are patches available to improve qmail's performance on very-high-volume sites. We have not had the opportunity to try them, but given my experience I am not sure that we want to.)

I'm actually not a big fan of sendmail qua sendmail. But anti-sendmail sentiment is just pretty overblown these days, and the rebellion hype is not convincing. Sendmail is one of the classic open source success stories, it is a fine piece of software with a great future, and an excellent choice for a project to support.

What strings?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no strings attached to Mozilla. Yes, all the changes to the old 4.x browser have been marketing related, but that's due to the fact that they don't want to waste developer effort on 4.x when they could be putting it into Mozilla.

As for how they justify it, they have to ship a branded AOL browser, and aren't particularly friendly with Microsoft. They'd very much like to dump the IE engine from their browser as soon as the antitrust fight ends (probably late 2000, early 2001).

Internet Connectivity is so cheap now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Network connectivity has really fallen in price... You can get an unlimited dialup connection for 9.95 almost anywhere in the US.

For christ sakes, I have a 3 meg cable modem connection for less than $40/month. That's dirt cheap! They could charge $200/month and I'd still pay! It's like having a T1 to my house...

Re:Internet Connectivity is so cheap now...

[slashdot-terminal]

Network connectivity has really fallen in price... You can get an unlimited dialup connection for 9.95 almost anywhere in the US.

But in theory can I connect at 300 baud? Without backwards compatability we are nothing.

For christ sakes, I have a 3 meg cable modem connection for less than $40/month. That's dirt cheap! They could charge $200/month and I'd still pay! It's like having a T1 to my house...


Until everyone on the block decides to get a cable modem because of the stellar product endosement. Then you have sub modem speeds again for $40/month

Re:Internet Connectivity is so cheap now...

[jonathan_ingram]

Repeat 3 times: the US is not the world.

You are in an enormously priviledged position in the US - you probably have no idea how much we in the UK envy your free local calls.

Re:Internet Connectivity is so cheap now...

[jonnythan]

Oh my....
I have tried to connect to my ISP using an old 300 baud modem..and it worked perfectly. Why anyone would want to do this when 56k modems can be bought over at CompUSA for less than $10 baffles me.
"Without backwards compatibility we are nothing." What's wrong with you? Why would you connect to an ISP at 300 baud, and pay your $5-$10 a month to do so? 300 baud is virtually worthless for anything you can do with your ISP . Anyone who can afford an ISP account will be able to afford a cheap modem.

And...hm...I'm not a flamer, but what the hell are you doing on Slashdot if networks are worthless? If they're so useless, don't freaking use them. Dont pay your ISP for a worthless, unreliable connection. And if you're connecting at work, shame on you, both for working for a company who uses a network (those idiots) and wasting your company's bandwidth.

Bah.

catch a clue please

[CrudPuppy]

redhat is not making any more money than
the day the stock went public...

PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT STOCK in redhat and had faith
and/or took a gamble are making money by selling
redhat stock to those who want it--at a much
higher price since demand has since gone through
the roof.

Re:catch a clue please

[Anonymous Coward]

Give the guy a break. He said.... > Ok, Red Hat doesn't get any money directly from the stock's rise from its IPO. HOWEVER, they can still use the stock as a form of currency for buyouts, they can do a secondary offering, they probably still have treasury stock that they could sell on the open market...there are all sorts of benefits (maybe not direct but nonetheless powerful) of having a really, really, really high market capitalization. If they want some money, they can just print up some more. In today's Linux crazy stock-market, investors are more than willing to buy it. This may not hold true forever, but it's working so far.

No, an even better license

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla uses the MPL and NPL licenses. MPL is much like LGPL, and NPL is MPL with an exception that allows them to continue using a few pieces of code that they were already using in their closed-source server products.

MPL is more truly free than GPL, so this is something to strongly encourage.

Re:No, an even better license

[Frostking]

Better is a very subjective term here. The MPL is a descent license in its own right, but is does hamper code exchange with the "rest" of the world who uses (L)GPL. But AFAIK if you ask you as usually permited to relicense any code you need for a project under the GPL.
Hopefully in the future they will decide to GPL it
outright.

Re:sendmail is not that bad, qmail is not that gre

[sterwill]

Theo can't release binaries of qmail; Dan's license prohibits that. Such a restriction would rather hamper its adoption as a primary mailer for any operating system. If you want a better replacement for Sendmail, try Postfix. It's license is very nice, it's configured similarly, and I don't lose any sleep over it.

--

Sendmail vs. postifix vs. qmail vs. the world?

[ajs]

I see a lot of "why not invest in qmail or postfix" comments, and I have to admit that at first I thought the same way. However, if you think of this from a support standpoint, Red Hat users are currently running Sendmail, and Red Hat needs to support it. This annoncement is just a nice way of saying, "There are a number of problems or shortcomings that will cost us a lot to support, and we just want them fixed." That's my take.

Mozilla is pretty much the same way. They want to stop getting support calls about how netscape crashes all the time, so they put money into Mozilla, which is already on their map for upcoming versions.

This is not a change in policy, just a PR wrapper around customer support R&D....

Re:Sendmail vs. postifix vs. qmail vs. the world?

[MasterMnd]

sounds reasonable enough, but there's one problem with that theory. doesn't RH LIKE having customers calling them with support questions since they charge for support?

this may also have to do with why they're backing sendmail instead of a possibly easier to set-up e-mail system - so they get more support calls? I'm not going to profess to know really what mail system is the best or easiest or whatever, I tried out sendmail and qmail, qmail was the one I was able to get working first, and I set-up qmail for my office.

Re:Sendmail vs. postifix vs. qmail vs. the world?

[shub]

I have previously worked for Collective Technologies, a consulting company that has their own 1-800 and 1-900 number support lines that they offer to their customers. Red Hat has a partnership with CT wherein CT provides "premier support" for Red Hat worldwide.

You'll note that CT also has a partnership deal with Sendmail, Inc. During my time there, one of the serious pitches we made to Greg and Eric was that CT provide *all* the call center support for sendmail. As it turns out, although Sendmail, Inc has their own call center support team, they have actively pursued a partnership with CT in other areas, and even before that partnership was official, there was plenty of business they were sending our way because they simply couldn't handle it all.


I can tell you from personal experience that unless you're a professional support organization (such as a consulting company) and you can focus exclusively on providing technical support (including 1-800/1-900 support), you simply *cannot* provide that support at a sustainable cost that you can charge to your customers.

This is why more and more businesses are out-sourcing their entire support operations to dedicated support and consulting companies, such as CT.


The advantage that CT has is that they can provide far more than just standard 1-800/1-900 support, and if a customer has an in-depth problem the call center folks can pass the issue over to the appropriate regional sales representatives, and they can actually put a warm body on-site for that customer.

Companies like Red Hat and Microsoft can't do this. They instead rely on companies like CT to provide those additional consulting services. Even companies like Sendmail, Inc. have a hard time doing this, even though they've managed to snap up virtually every sendmail or SMTP-knowledgeable person whose name I've ever heard (and who could be stolen away from their current endeavours), and a lot of guys whose names are completely unknown to me.


Anyway, my point is that Red Hat can't possibly charge a fee that would be high enough to actually pay for all the potential sendmail support calls that they might get, and therefore it's in their best interest to pay big money to Sendmail, Inc. to become a preferred corporate customer, and get a lot more attention paid to their own agenda, in terms of bug-fixes, etc....

Exim...agreed.

[Brian Knotts]

I really like Exim. It does what I need it to do, with minimal fuss. I also like that Exim is GPLd.

And, it's really quite flexible. There are other good MTAs of course, but I wouldn't count Sendmail among them.


Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.

Attitude towards Microsoft

[Camelot]

It is interesting to note how RedHat has turned a full 180 degrees concerning its stance towards Microsoft. I recall that their policy was - not so long ago - that they specifically did not compete with Microsoft.

I really do have to assume that this is what they were originally aiming at anyway. For some reason - may it be the Microsoft trial or inappropriate timing - they kept it a secret. Building momentum, mayhaps.

In any case, this means that RedHat remains everyone's favorite child. The market loves them, the Open Source community still backs them (even though a lot of criticism exists). It may inevitable lead to a clash between RedHat and the community.. but that's far off, so let's enjoy the show for now.

Re:Attitude towards Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat had to pretend not to be competeing with Microsoft until the ink dried on the Finding of Fact (sic).

what about opera?

[labiss]

perhaps if mozilla hurry's and gets stable, it and opera can duke it out while PC Magazine writes little articles about it in all of which they say: "Linux, an alternative to Windows invented by Finnish developer, Linus Torvalds and is now maintained by a team of hackers around the globe..."
Die resource-sucking Netscape!!!

--
David,
the supreme commander
of the anti-authority club.

misquote nitpick

[Anonymous Coward]

iirc, the quote is:

"My mother said there aren't any monsters. Not real ones. But there are."

Of course, I could be wrong, so to avoid making a fool of myself, I'm posting as AC.. :P

Re: investing makes you good

[Autonomous Cow]

people invest in red hat
people invest in microsoft
red hat = microsoft

Significant investment == money

[elpapacito]

And where there is a significant investment there is money , and of course they expect some kind of return out of the investment. And If the software is free, who's going to pay the bill in the long term ?

Good but probably not needed.

[fishlet]

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see Red Hat do this good deed for Mozilla... but heck, I'm just not excited about this anymore a year later. I'm really hopeful that Konquerer with KDE2 will be as good as the reports I'm hearing. If it is, it is unlikely that I'll open up a sepparate browser when I've already got all that functionality built into my KDE desktop. Despite M$ evil intents of integrating IE so closely to it's OS, one must admit that it has it's advantages. Combined with QT2's improved themeability... Konquerer my be some real competion for my Neoplanet/IE combo on that other OS.

Playing the Game Properly.

[Koruna]

I suspect that what keeps Bob Young awake at night is the thought that, implicit in his company's stock price, the market is assuming that his company will be generating earnings of approx US$500mm - US$1 billion. In the long run, the market will look for earnings, not buzz. When that day arrives, RH had damn well better have plenty of earnings on their 10-Q, or the bubble will burst.

If I was in Mr. Young's shoes (oh, would that I were!), I'd be looking to do two things, fast.

1) Use my ultra-cheap currency (stock) to buy things of real value (i.e. companies that are actually making money) while the stock is still up in the stratosphere.

2) Use my IPO funds to seed applications and technology that are critical to the success of RH. (No, not "the Linux community" - Mr. Young & Co. are duty-bound to look out for their shareholders, not the rest of us. It is a happy consequence of the GPL, and similar licenses, that what benefits RH will, in most every case, benefit most of us who are using Linux/BSD/whatever, but for his shareholders' sake, I hope that's not his motive.)

It appears from the acquisition of Cygnus that RH is already pursuing strategy #1 with vigor. If the Corel rumors pan out, they'll not only be acquiring earnings and technology, but also acting as a market consolidator.

It appears from these announcements that they also understand the importance (financial and political) of pursuing strategy #2.

Whenever you see an announcement like this, ask yourself: is this deal being done in cash (which, for a company with US$15mm revenues, is quite costly even post-IPO) or in stock (which is getting cheaper by the day)? Discount all-stock deals accordingly.

Re:Why Sendmail? - linuxconf

[XNormal]

Configuring sendmail is notoriously difficult, but with linuxconf it was very easy and it works like a charm. I'm sure postfix, qmail and exim are all worthy mailers but I just don't have the time to go through their manuals.

This may be a good reason for me to use sendmail but it definitely isn't a reason why redhat should use it as the default mailer in the first place.

BTW. compared to Mozilla, sendmail is an extremely lean monster - it's memory footprint is actually quite small.


----

Sendmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Sendmail... hehe... now *there* is an application consumers will love. Gosh, SMTP is so fun for all ages.

AAAAHHHH! I CAN'T KEEP MY SELF CONTROL!!!

[Nicolas MONNET]

I can't believe how people can say such crap. HEEeee--llooo??? THIS IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. You don't like what AOL/RedHat/Whoever is doing? FORK THE TREE!!! Oh but you don't have the skills to do it? SO STOP COMPLAINING. Nobody owes you anything. I'M SORRY, I CAN'T BEAR THAT ANYMORE!!! This is cracking ME UP!!! Hey fucking loser! GET A FUCKIN' CLUE!!!
And on top of that it got a +1 moderation!!!! DAMN IT!!!

--

Re:RED$AT WILL BUY MOZILLA AND SENDMAIL

[mjordan]

I just don't get it. Why so many people shouing those Redhat is like M$ rants. It's too early to tell this. Even they will turn into M$ eventually, I don't care if they can produce a good browser and internet server platform for me. At least they are fighting again M$ now and M$ is still too big to be defeated. We should unite to fight this battle.

Things that don't belong in a browser

[Outland Traveller]

I too was very much turned off by the marketing "features" creeping into both netscape and mozilla releases. Is there any way to get rid of them? I hope they can be customized away in Mozilla.

It's just wrong that you can't choose to not install AOL IM. Even if you go and delete the AIM directory inside netscape communicator folders, you are still left with the annoying button on your browser window. The "shop" buttons are similar garbage. Am I the only one who is offended by this? At work I received a compaq laptop and it came with a shopping button.. blech. I traded up for a toshiba instead.

Listen here corporate america, I don't want any shopping button. I don't want any push-content channels on my desktop. I don't want instant messaging software controlled by a third party server- all I want is a fast, powerful computer with applications that do no more than they need to. My computer is a tool, not my personal temple to consumerism.

While I'm in rant mode... Ever notice how even if you choose custom install on windows98 and deselect the "online services" junk, they are still installed on your hard drive and show up on the desktop. Blech.

Re:Things that don't belong in a browser

[luge]

Deep breath...

Repeat after me: Mozilla is Open Source. Open Source means infinitely customizable. Open Source means if you want to compile out the shop button, odds are someone with a brain (which clearly you aren't) will probably want to too, and take it out for you.

Seriously, people- the rantings and ravings about bloat and the like in Mozilla drive me nuts. If you want a "pure" browser, go use lynx or wc3. If you want a graphical browser that stands a snowballs chance in hell against IE, either put up with the bloat or go in and fix it. You can, you know...
~luge

Re:Things that don't belong in a browser

[Mike Shaver]

I too was very much turned off by the marketing "features" creeping into both netscape and mozilla releases.

Which ``marketing "features"'' crept into Mozilla releases? The only thing I can think of was the keywords stuff, and it was in for about half an hour before the developer in question did The Right Thing and backed it out (pending pref control defaulted to off, etc.)

Re:Things that don't belong in a browser

[Vidar Hokstad]

You don't even need to recompile: The entire Mozilla user interface is written in XML.

Re:Things that don't belong in a browser

[Outland Traveller]

Yes, that's what it was. I couldn't remember exactly what part of the M releases I was having a hard time with, but knew there was something.

I've been following the M's since 5 regularly but stopped when I found one that included the "Smart browsing" keywords that send all the addresses you type in back to netscape for massaging. I always disable this in the regular netscape releases, but was hoping that the open source version would come with more privacy-friendly defaults.

I haven't checked the latest release. I'll take your word for it that it's been taken out, or at least disabled as the default. Thanks for that info.

don't tell me that just cause they make it OSS

[Nicolas MONNET]

and it's to gain them in the end, just like MS does, so don't tell me that just cause they make it open source makes it all better

BECAUSE IT'S OPEN SOURCE IT MAKES IT ALL BETTER. Are you insane???? It's truly open source, THEREFORE, if they act in a way that people don't like, ANYBODY can fork the tree and drag it in the direction they wish. THAT IS THE FUCKING POINT OF OPEN SOURCE, CRETIN!!!!

I can't believe people can be THAT stupid and paranoid!!!!

MODERATE ME DOWN IF YOU WANT, I'M SORRY I CAN'T KEEP MY COOL WHEN I READ SUCH IDIOCY.

--

Re:don't tell me that just cause they make it OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever consider cutting back on the caffeine?

Re:don't tell me that just cause they make it OSS

[fReNeTiK]

THAT IS THE FUCKING POINT OF OPEN SOURCE, CRETIN!!!!

Bordel de merde tu vas te calmer ou quoi?

It's because of posts such as this one (and the other one right above) that /. has been going downwards for the last few weeks...

And now, If you'll excuse me, I'll go watch the rest of 2001, for the 2^4th time...



--

Support Mozilla because it's "DESKTOP INDEPENDANT"

[savaget]

I am glad that Red Hat are supporting a multiplatform and desktop independant Web browser. A browser like Konqueror(sp?) is not desktop independant, and therefore if I do no wish to use KDE, then Mozilla is much better.

Problem is, Mozilla like Nescape is more than a browser which makes it not as light as it could be. Please drop the mail and webeditor parts of it.

well, duh

[delmoi]

Of corse there in it for the money, they always were. what the hell did you exspect? Don't like it? use debian
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

SGI would be a better purchase

[mattdm]

SGI seems like a good target for Red Hat. Really cool technology, great Linux stuff. And they could certainly afford it.

--

shlow internet connections

[delmoi]

I tried connecting to my ISP with a 300baud connection, but it never gave me anything less then 1200 (I was using a 33.6k)
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Re:Support Mozilla because it's "DESKTOP INDEPENDA

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. When I download Mozilla M11 I see the size of download.. the browser isn't tiny, at least not compiled for debug. Too slow if I'm not using a brand new expensive computer with a PIII cpu and huge ultra wide SCSI-3 harddisk drive. Unusable to the point of not crashing explorer.exe and putting window refresh to sleep on a Pentium 200 Mhz, 32M RAM, IDE 2G running Windows 95. Still if you did extract Mozilla M11, "configure --help | more", then look for configure's options for building without messenger and editor code. Menu items might show up in Mozilla though, there was a bug report for that I think, could that have been fixed?

Cool down. Take a deep breath.

[fReNeTiK]

Hey,

you know you actually seem to have a point. But how do you expect other readers (or moderators, for that matter) to get it if you shout in such a crazed way?

I repeat: You are basically right in the fact that, because until now it has been the policy of RedHat to publish all their code under the GPL, there is no danger of them becoming "the next Microsoft" (..). Now, doesn't that sound a little more readable than your above rant?
Some people around here should learn a little bit about diplomacy and politeness...

And btw: The GPL has never been tested in court until the present day...

Actually: Sue'em Bruce ;)

Have a pleasant day, mon ami.

--

Why do you people complain?

[Diggety_Dank]

As far as i know, many of the people in this forum have never given Redhat ANYTHING, yet you whine and complain with every move that stands to significantly benefit you or your cause. Don't like sendmail now? Well, a little extra development "oomph" couldn't hurt it. Is Mozilla progressing too slowly for you? Same idea. The point here is that Redhat does a lot of work for the linux community, and gives back all the source code as GNU software, at no cost to you. Sure, they're the largest software distributor of linux, sure they often cater to newbies, but they're one of the best things linux has going for it. As linux continues to grow, you can either accept that Redhat will be a major factor in that, or go use something else. The reason people hate MS is because of its low quality, bloated software, and cut throat business tactics, NOT because they're the biggest. Don't hate something because it is big, hate it for a good reason.

Mozilla and Sendsnail are a waste...

[pik0]

...of time and money! They should invest in what are emerging technologies. Provide funding for Blackdown to get Java 2 ported to Linux (it doesn't quite work, yet). Andrew

Re:Mozilla and Sendsnail are a waste...

[bero-rh]

Java is not free. We can't even include it in the distribution because it may not be freely redistributed.
Alternative implementations of Java 2 are more interesting unless sun decide to change their licenses.

GtkMozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd imagine the majority of people using mozilla aren't using gnome (though it's still a nice dream). i actually hate mozilla with a passion, maybe even moreso than internet explorer and netscape, but along with mozilla they're making gtkmozilla, which opens the door for many JoesBrowser mozilla spin-offs (maybe one with a sane memory footprint?). the future is looking very bright indeed.

Re:sendmail is not that bad, qmail is not that gre

[RollingThunder]

While I agree that binary distros of qmail would make things a lot easier, it's really not that hard (on Debian, at least).

I view it along the lines of those 49% assembled home airplane kits, or whatever, except even easier. I just type "build-qmail" (or whatever it is, it's been a while) and off it goes, come back in a bit and dpkg the new .deb in. Null brain strain.

heh

[Anonymous Coward]

it's their fault that the gpl is so restrictive? the MPL is a freer licence than the GPL, but somehow that's a bad thing in the free software world. RMS kicks some serious ass, but he sure screwed up the GPL. now i can't even compile free software with "free" GPL software, since the GPL is so restrictive, eeks.

oops should have hit preview :(

[Anonymous Coward]

compile = distribute

Re: investing makes you good

[lunatik17]

yeah, people invest in porkbellies too. What's your point? I wouldn't trust you to code a FOR loop with your demonstrated grasp of logic--the fact that people invest in both companies is in no way proof of similarity!

Re:Why Sendmail? - linuxconf

[guacamole]

I wouldn't hire a sysadmin who configures sendmail with linuxconf

what graphical DOTADIW browsers are there, anyway?

[fwoomp]

I like browsers that "do one thing and do it well" without all kinds of extra baggage. (Of course, it's going to do more than just strictly "one" thing, but as long as it only has useful AND relevant features...) What are the available choices along these lines? I don't necessarily mean free, btw.

Sendmail? Let it rest in peace ...

[Morgaine]

Sendmail has had its decades of usefulness. Many very bright people have worked very hard for years at producing MTAs that are better than sendmail in numerous respects. The top three replacement MTAs (**in_alphabetic_order** Exim, qmail and zmailer) have a superb track record and are in use all over the net running the mail exchangers and delivery back ends for multi-million customer ISPs. They are also easy to use and configure on single-user workstations. There is no reason not to use them.

Of course, people do like to use whatever system they are currently used to, and that's why most people currently run Windows. Despite that, we try to overcome their inertia and show them that there is a better technology available.

Let's do the same for sendmail. It served us well in its day, but since there is no *technical* reason left for anyone to prefer sendmail over the newer MTAs, let's relegate it to the annals of history at long last. Its use should be deprecated.

Syntax highlighting of PHP

[Jason Earl]

I am a pretty hard-core Emacs user, but even _I_ must admit that vim is a good choice for editting those pesky .php documents. It has intelligent syntax highlighting for PHP, it's fast, your fingers need never leave home row, and once you learn vi's eccentricities you will never again be able to type in anything else.

No technical reason, it's just there

[Morgaine]

All the newer MTAs are better than sendmail, largely because sendmail was the reference and they were developed purposely to be better than sendmail.

Exim, qmail, zmailer, postfix and smail are probably the five best known, and the first three in the list are used extremely widely in mega ISPs all over the world. So is sendmail, but that's changing as sysadmins discover that alternatives to it exist.

The improvement achieved by switching from sendmail to a more modern MTA can be massive: eg. when we converted our systems from sendmail to Exim some 3 years ago, the throughput increased by a factor of 10, and that was without any optimization.

Sendmail has nothing *technical* going for it. It's used a lot merely because it comes pre-installed on virtually every Unix system, which of course is exactly the same reason why most people use Windows on PCs. It's not a particularly good reason.

Re:No technical reason, it's just there

[shub]

I disagree. While for the vast majority of people, there is no technical reason why sendmail should be preferred over other MTAs, there are cases where more obscure things need to be done and sendmail is simply the only functional choice.

I can do things with sendmail rewrite rules that are simply impossible (or at least *extremely* difficult) in other MTAs. This is why postfix is only 99% sendmail-compatible, since that last 1% is a killer.


Of course, sendmail *is* the best documented MTA in the world (it actually has two books written on the subject, Sendmail: Theory and Practice by Avolio and Vixie, and the definitive reference sendmail (now in it's second edition) by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman.

Then there's the increased available online documentation, both the FAQ, and my own Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems paper that I wrote and presented at SANE'98.

While perhaps not strictly a technical reason, available documentation (or the lack thereof) is a very strong motivating factor as to why many people choose to select particular products, SMTP MTAs included.

Re:No technical reason, it's just there

[orabidoo]

yes, sendmail is the most powerful MTA out there, in that its config language is even Turing-complete. great. now, a few months ago I needed to do something quite unusual with an MTA (keeping some usernames locally, while passing others to another SMTP server, ignoring MX records in the process). with qmail, it was a matter of reading a few manpages, then finding the right place to make a change, and adding 5 lines of C to the source. now, this may sound harder than just tweaking a config file, but it isn't necessarily. qmail's code is quite clear (although the style is unusual), and the whole thing took about two hours, testing included. I certainly didn't need to buy a book, or anything like that. I'm sure that, with Sendmail, I would have needed more time just to understand what to change in the config file. IMO, there is something seriously wrong about an MTA that needs *books* to be written about it.

/. users bash REDHAT because they don't own stock

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically because people beleive that $$$ will corrupt anyone/anything. I'm certain that there are also more than a few people who are peaved either for helping build Linux or evangelize Linux who do not have a piece of the 16 billion dollar pie.

correction: www.qmail.org

[Tim Pierce]

I am told that there are patches available to improve qmail's performance on very-high-volume sites.

The correct URL for patches is, of course, http://www.qmail.org/, not http://www.quaker.org. I blame the Scotch.

Sendmail ???

[AftanGustur]

Why sendmail ?

If RedHat wants to do some good, then put engineers into helping Wetse with his Postfix client.

Want to know why ?? Here are some slides to convince you. French only, sorry, but I think you should be able to understand most of it.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?

Predictable....

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I just looked at the headline of this one and basically predicted what the comments would be like. Slashdot you are getting to quite predictable and unoriginal. Same old M$ is evil, Red Hat is evil, Sun is evil, bleh, bleh, bleh, BLEH! Give it a rest and get back to work. Do you think the evil empire sleeps or has time to post on message boards? Yer losing the battle! Seriously, this all corporations are evil crap is pure bunk. People say M$ is evil, and they basically are. But with the amount of money involved I think any corporation would do virtually the same things as M$ if given the chance.

But the fact is Linux needs corporations to succeed. Linux needs corporations to use it, and it needs corporations to support it. You people rant on and on about Linux being so great for the enterprise and then lose sight of the fact that companies tend to like to have other companies to YELL AT if something breaks. Someone with a LOT of money to fork out in case a law suit is necessary (ie that recent Peoplesoft Fiasco). Companies tend to like to have real employees of the software vendor come out to their site and integrate new systems into their existing networks. That's where Red Hat comes in. Don't be fucking clueless about this, as this is just the way it goes if you want Linux to truly penetrate the Enterprise server space. Have a nice day. I'm off to go fight with a Red Hat box actually :)

Sponsoring KDE and Gnome (Re:sendmail)

[bero-rh]

Actually Red Hat is already sponsoring both KDE and GNOME.

Red Hat is NOT anti-KDE

[bero-rh]

Subject says it all - at the same time, some Red Hat developers are working actively on KDE (including Konqueror).
Working on Mozilla is no more anti-KDE than working on bash [==another way to do the same thing] is.

What kind of message are they sending?

[Tyrell Hawthorne]

Yes, it's a good thing for us interested in these programs that the companies are porting their programs and giving them away for free. This seems to be happening a lot. There is a downside to it, though. Think about what kind of message this sends to the software world. Remember people, a lot of the influential people just read the very-mainstream-media, and what they report is that "all" (virtually) companies that release (port or make) software for Linux give them away. That's not a good market (at least not in most people's eyes, look at Redhat though) and they will not be very likely to relase _their_ software for Linux. It is important that they realize that programs for Linux don't *have to be* free. And that's not the message these stories send.

Fast paced action

[Eythain]

Just a little over a year ago, Netscape invested in Red Hat. Now Red Hat is investing in the Mozilla browser. Boy things are sure move fast in this day and age. But on a related thread, skimming through the the post to see if my post was redundant and the point had been made n times already, it occured to me as it has many times before the the scare of Red Hat growing to M$ proportions. But instead of being destructive about it, spreading Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, doesn't anyone have constructive thoughts on what is necessary for this not to happen?

After all, even if RedHat won't what's to prevent other companies from doing this?

Food for thought... Eythain

Re:Fast paced action

[ejay]

I would love to see Mozilla become a viable browser once again. And if it takes money from Redhat to do that it peachy keen by me.

Once upon a time, Netscape was the best browser. Now web developers have learned to curse both Netscape and IE. I would love not to have do all kinds of tricks not to have to support the peculiarities of both common browsers. And money from Redhat may just make that a little easier.

Make the net easier to use with less complicated browsers intracacies makes it better for everyone ... even with RedHat's money.

• Emery Jeffreys

Re:Support Mozilla because it's "DESKTOP INDEPENDA

[Vidar Hokstad]

Mozilla is heavily componentized, and it shouldn't be much of a problem to remove the mail and editor components.

Moderation is broken

[Brian Knotts]

And on top of that it got a +1 moderation!!!!

This has been happening quite often lately. Bad moderation is out of control; it is not being checked by meta-moderation.

I really think they need to only allow moderator points to accounts with karma over 20 or something.

Funny thing is that I have a decent karma, but have only moderated twice. And I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for two years.


Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.

Even easier in Exim!

[Morgaine]

You might like Exim then. The requirement you stated can be configured directly in its wonderfully clear yet powerful configuration language, without needing any additional code.