"Peter C. Norton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>[Eric Allman]'s got a great reputation in the press and at the
>executive level. He's the name that's associated with sendmail,
>sendmail is publicised as running "75% of the mail on the internet"
>right? I think his code and mailer is shoddy, but his reputation in
>the wider world seems to be completely unconnected with the security,
>speed, or reliability* of the software he's written.
s/Eric Allman/Bill Gates/
s/sendmail/Windows/g
s/75% of the mail on the internet/95% of the PC's in the world/
(OK, so Bill's reputation has suffered lately. That's just because
he's been so successful. 75% is dominance, but 95% is monopoly. And
sendmail is free, Windows isn't.)
I agree, but I was thinking not about reputation as perceived by the
public, but reputation as perceived by people with >= 0.5 clue. You
might counter that the partially clueful are likely to realize where
the true blame is deserved, and you might be right.
>A lot of people use and like sendmail. Probably a lot more then the
>number of people who've deployed qmail.
No doubt.
>> Of course not. But victims of these third party changes will surely go
>> to him or his lists for help. And these victims will also be unaware
>> of the changes their vendor made, so the help they get might be
>> wrong.
>
>True. Is that so bad?
That's DJB's call, not mine or yours.
>The list and djb get a lot of mail already.
>New users have questions that need to be answered no matter what their
>method of installation. All a standard, even broken distribution
>really changes is that the question becomes a FAQ almost immideatly,
>and can be answered simply and thoroughly.
That's the way it goes in most cases. I think the problem is that DLB
doesn't do things the way most people do, and most people--not too
suprisingly--don't like that.
>Why all of the negativity? I think a package author would be happy
>that he stops getting FAQ's in his mailbox because a lot of nifty
>things are included in the package that users always ask him and/or
>inn mailing lists for, and that cuts down on the traffic. Maybe it
>evens out or tips the balance towards the package reducing irrelevant
>traffic.
You might think that, and most of the time you'd be right. Except,
apparently, when the author is DJB.
-Dave
