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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!
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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.