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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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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
>> 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!
----
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
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
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.
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.
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.
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....