On Tue, Dec 29, 1998 at 04:12:27PM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> Remember, Red Hat is a big bux commercial operation (see recent news
> reports of substantial investment in Red Hat by Intel). They don't
> produce Open Source Software because they're nice guys and it makes
> them feel good to give away their wonderful operating system.
Only part right. Those I've talked to at redhat say that they give
their work back to the community, and for free, because they believe
it's a valid business model, but also because it makes them feel good.
They were and are bucking the pointy-haired trend in the computer
world. A big part of it is because what they're doing makes them feel
good.
> They're
> in the business to make money. They do it by selling shrink wrapped
> RHL, support services, and various LINUX add-ons.
That too. But they do more of the "because it makes us feel good"
kind of thing then anyone else I know in the community (OSS, Free
Software, what have you. Even RMS likes them). That's partly becaue
their business gives them the revenue that lets them support the stuff
that lets them feel good. It's not exactly cut-n-dried.
> If Red Hat was a bunch of geeks dedicated to furthering the hacker
> ethic, replacing sendmail with qmail or even postfix or exim would be
> a no-brainer. They'd evaluate the choices, pick a winner, and do
> whatever it would take to implement the switch.
I disagree. The choices are more then technical, because Dan makes it
so. View debian linux, or stampede linux - they are what you
describe, as I believe the freebsd and openbsd core teams are. To my
knowledge none of these essentially hacker systems, or redhat's
hack-branch ("rawhide") have any option for qmail to be installed by
default. Obviously something besides technical considerations come
into play. Maybe something about qmail conflicts with the ethic of a
sizeable percentage of hackers?
> But Red Hat is more like a bunch of executives dedicated to growing
> the business and raising profits. Their techies might argue for
> replacing sendmail on the grounds that it would improve the quality of
> their product and hopefully avoid some negative publicity the next
> time sendmail is hacked, but that's not enough to justify the
> switch.
AFAIK this was a group decision. Ask them yourself next time you see
them at a trade show. They made up their mind at least 2 years ago,
and it seemed to be a unanimous decision throughout the group of about
10 geeks that ran the technical side at the time. Never mind that
redhat uses qmail for all of their list systems...
> The executives will want to be sure that the costs of
> switching are lower than the benefits of switching--otherwise they'll
> lose some of their precious growth or profits.
I disagree again. If it was viable for them to offer qmail as a
replacement beyond the technical considerations (and Dan has gone to
alot of trouble so that there aren't any technical considerations in
the simplest cases) then they would. So what else is there?
[deletia]
I'm soundly opposed to the picture you paint of linux or other free
OS' being monolithic inflexible distributions. Options can be
offered, and are at install time. Because your opinions seem to rest
on that assumption I won't address your points, which are mostly valid
but aren't stated in a way that allows them to mate with the situation
as I understand it. If your POV (as I read it) that the motivating
reason redhat doesn't do this is because they're a pointy-haired
business was at all accurate then all non-pointy-haired OS
distributions should have qmail, right? Well, where is qmail? I see
wu-ftpd being replaced by proftpd in places, I see apache installed
instead of CERN or NCSA httpd, I see gnu utilities instead of BSD
utils, or where appropriate BSD utils instead of GNU utils, I see
network code getting tightened up, kernels being scrutinized, but I
don't see qmail anywhere.
What's the answer?
> I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. From Red Hat's point
> of view, the inertia behind sendmail is substantial and the mere
> availability of a superior alternative isn't compelling enough to make
> them switch.
Then why haven't any of the other many free operating system
distributions moved towards qmail?
-Peter
