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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. "
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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...).
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.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
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.
>> 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.
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...
Tweet, tweet.
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!
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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.
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.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
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
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.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
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
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
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
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.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
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.)
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.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
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 :-)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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:
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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.
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??
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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.
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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....
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.
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.
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--
Actually, Red Hat already actively develop's Gnome.
-Brent--
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.
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.
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' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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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)
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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.
--- Stampede linux for me! I play with fire to break the ice..
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.
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.
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
as for Mozilla, well, whatever can help bring it to usability soon, will be good.
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.
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra