On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Ken Hornstein wrote: > Right now, it's open source, and Qualcomm can't magically _make_ it > proprietary and tell everyone who's currently running it that they > have to give them money.
They'd would be _extremely_ hard pressed to do that. Qpopper is a direct descendant of the Berkeley popper. While it's now had at least one almost complete rewrite, it's still under BSD license. If it went payware/closed source tomorrow, the current version would still be out there as free (which means free to develop, not free in price). > Uh, buddy ... news flash here. That ALREADY HAPPENED. There's was > "Qpopper LX" (IIRC) a year or two ago. It was eventually discontinued, > people who bought it were given a refund, and the results were released > as Qpopper 4. You'd have to ask Qualcomm about what was going on > there; I only watched it externally. I'd say that not enough people were willing to pay money and that the ones who did wanted Qualcomm to be a dancing pony for not enough income to make it worthwhile. It's not the first time there's been a payware fork of a product which has folded back in due to the closing of the source tree meaning there aren't enough eyes on the code to audit it properly _or_ to pay for the developers working on it. Large chunks of the major code evolution in Qpopper has not come from Qualcomm, but it needs Qualcomm to act as coordinator and the list to vet the code. Without that symbiosis, support for this popper would have died years ago. As I said, I use Courier now. There are specific reasons for doing so and the only reason I switched was because I needed features qpopper doesn't have - such as SSL IMAP(*) - and never will. For ISP use, most of the time it's bad for users to keep mail on the server, so qpopper is the better choice. (*) I have a number of users who are in countries where their pop3 traffic _is_ being snooped, and not always by the government. In one case they _are_ the government and the snoopers are the monopoly Telco their predecessors put in place and now can't be removed. AB
