On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 09:32:30PM +0530, Bill Long wrote: > I am probably wrong, but it seems to me that the origin of Courier was that > of a single individual who built himself a program that he needed. Then was > kind enough to open it up to the rest of the world. I'm wondering if there > is a difference between that kind of Open Source project and the ones that > are started from scratch to be open source, with a full team, and the goal > of providing an alternative software. To me, there is a big difference.
I don't think that's necessarily true. As a counterexample I give exim: written by one guy (Philip Hazel), for the internal use of the University of Cambridge Computing Service. However it has developed into something which seems to meet absolutely everyone's needs, and hugely comprehensive documentation to boot. No disrespect to Sam of course. Perhaps working in academia gives Philip the time to do all this :-) The other aspect of Open Source is that it's a free market in free software. Of course you can customise package X to do what you want (but there is an ongoing maintenance overhead, if the project owner chooses not to accept your patches back into the mainstream code base). So you may be better off choosing package Y instead, if that suits your environment or your feature requirements better. Regards, Brian. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by:Crypto Challenge is now open! Get cracking and register here for some mind boggling fun and the chance of winning an Apple iPod: http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0031en _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
