"Peter C. Norton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>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.
OK, granted. But Red Hat is more than the handful of techies you've
talked to. It's a business entity that exists independently of any of
its employees. It's got strategic and equity partners such as Intel,
Netscape, and a couple venture capital firms. Regardless of the
altruism of the employees, these partners have significant influence
in how Red Hat does business.
>> 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.
Such choices are *always* more than technical. But, yes, qmail's
licensing makes it harder for Linux packagers to include than less
restrictively licensed MTA's. My point here is that Dan's restictions
are not insurmountable. There are no legal or technical reasons why
qmail--even binary distributions--couldn't be distributed with Linux.
>> 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?
Sounds like either a personality clash or a refusal by Red Hat to
include software they can't diddle with.
>I'm soundly opposed to the picture you paint of linux or other free
>OS' being monolithic inflexible distributions.
Oppose all you want. It's na�ve to think of RHL as some kind of
altruistic, cooperative effort with unlimited resources to support
multiple alternatives to large, complex subsystems like MTA's.
>... 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?
Firstly, I don't know what you mean by "pointy-haired". My contention
is that there are no legal or technical reasons that RH couldn't offer
qmail with RHL. Further, RH is a business, and any decision regarding
qmail would, at least in part, be a business decision. I don't think
Red Hat is evil because they're commercial, I just realize it impacts
their decisionmaking.
>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?
Obviously licensing is a factor, but I still think inertia is a bigger
part of it. If qmail replaced sendmail as transparently as any of your
examples above replace their counterparts, I think we'd see a lot more
qmail.
>Then why haven't any of the other many free operating system
>distributions moved towards qmail?
Ask them. Red Hat demands the right to fiddle with the code. I asked
the OpenBSD folks about it a long time ago and their response was that
they weren't sure qmail was free (this was pre-1.0) and that sendmail
had a lot of inertia.
-Dave
