Hi Paul,
We put this page online the night you contacted us, and the day before our official announcements:
http://www.webmail.us/open-source
Apparently I didn't look hard enough.
FYI- this page is one click from our home page. It is the landing page of our “Partners” section. Again, let me know if this is the type of recognition you’re looking for, or what else I can do to help.
As far as I am concerned, this is wonderful. To be on the first page that shows from clicking "Partners" is quite prominent. Others may have different opinions, but I thank you for this kind of placement and again want to apologize for having jumped the gun and misread you and your company.
We’ll also be putting something similar on our corporate web site (www.excedent.com).
Excellent!
Paul, I have no problem giving credit to your team and the open source community. I think the work you’ve done is great and we’re proud to be affiliated with you all. It’s not something we try to hide. Keep in mind that I gave all that info to InfoWorld… it wasn’t something they came up with by themselves.
I realize that, thus my indictment of companies who won't act similarly. Obviously, we Open Source developers cannot demand (and would be loathe to even think about doing so) anything from the users of our software, however, I hope the reasons are clear why you have set an example that should be followed more often.
Thanks again,
Paul
I will pass your info onto my CTO and VP of Product Development. I appreciate your response and again, feel free to come back to me with anything else.
Have a nice evening,
Pat
-----Original Message----- From: "p dont think" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sat, November 6, 2004 8:16 pm To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Webmail.us & SquirrelMail [was Re: [SM-USERS] Infoworld Article]
Pat,
FYI, I am cc'ing this to the SquirrelMail-Users mailing list.
Pat Matthews wrote:
Hi Paul,
Thanks again for pointing out the comments today about Webmail.us. There are, however, quite a few things that I would personally like to make you aware of.
First of all, I absolutely appreciate the hard work you and your team have done on the SquirrelMail project. You all have built a great product and the number of businesses and service providers that use it evidences that.
Many thanks.
I apologize that it currently looks like we’re not giving any credit to you and your team for your work. Unfortunately (or fortunately, I’m not sure which), the InfoWorld article went out a few days before we were making our official announcements about our adoption of SquirrelMail and the upgrades to our services. Needless to say, we’ve got many web site changes in store for the announcement.
Starting tomorrow (or late tonight), you will see several links to SquirrelMail and some of the other open source organizations we are working with. Once we have that online, I would be happy to hear your feedback and take your direction as to how else you would like to be portrayed on our web sites.
I have waited several days, and I still don't see a single mention of SquirrelMail on webmail.us. I presume your updates are still in the offing. If this is in fact the case, I appologize for having jumped the gun (or maybe InfoWorld should :) ).
I should also point out that at least there was *some* acknowledgment on your part (even if through InfoWorld) about using our product -- that made you an easy target, but we all know that there are *many* more companies who use SquirrelMail without ever contacting us, giving us credit, and so forth. I sure wish *those* companies would step up and throw us some crumbs of acknowledgment, if nothing else. At least Webmail.us has taken a small step in that direction. Thank you for that.
I would also like the opportunity to see how we can work together in the future. To date, the majority of our work around the SquirrelMail software has been heavy customization of the interface. However, we have a number of things planned for the future, which we may be able to work jointly with the SquirrelMail community on. Perhaps I could put you in touch with those involved with our ongoing webmail R&D. Would you be interested?
Absolutely. The best way to coordinate such work would be to have your developers participate in one of our mailing lists (as dictated by the nature of the work -- usually the devel or plugins lists), but they are also free to contact me personally.
Thanks, Pat.
- Paul Lesneiwski
Thank you,
- Pat
PS... feel free to post this to your list, I'm perfectly fine with that.
Patrick M. Matthews Chief Executive Officer Excedent Technologies, Inc. Virginia Tech Alumni
Read or subscribe to my blog: http://patmatthews.typepad.com
866.EXCEDENT X 80 703.338.3600 (Cell) 703.991.4441 (Fax) http://www.excedent.com http://www.webmail.us
Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center 2000 Kraft Drive, Suite 1300 Blacksburg, VA 24060
------------------------------- Original thread is as follows: -------------------------------
Thought everyone might be interested in this Infoworld article:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/29/HNwebmail_1.html
It describes Webmail.us' recent conversion from Windows proprietary systems to Open Source software like RedHat Linux, Postfix, Squirrelmail, ClamAV and Courier. Great to see this kind of publicity for Squirrelmail and other open source projects. Maybe in the future we'll get further details as to their setup, migration process, load balancing and issues they've faced.
Thanks for the link. This is very interesting to me for a couple of reasons:
At first glance, I wasn't sure they were yet using SquirrelMail, but in fact, viewing their code shows that they are in fact offering their users a highly-bastardized version of SM. This is great for SM, except that beside a quick almost in-passing mention in the InfoWorld article, there is no other mention of SM *anywhere* (that I could find). No thanks, no touting, no credit, no nothing.
Further, Webmail.us has done a lot of things with the SM code that would never be acceptable for the SM core (or even for plugins), but on the other hand, they've done a lot with look and feel as well as usability, and made several modifications to several plugins that, even if not usable as is for general release, would be *very* helpful to take a look at. That is, they took our product and put it into production... the least they could do (beside give us a little credit) is to share some of the modifications and fixes they've made. Isn't that in the spirit of the "movement"? They took; shouldn't they give back, too? I read pretty much every email that comes across the SM lists, and I sure haven't seen anything...
Don't get me wrong - this is exciting for SM, and it sure gives my heart a little blip to see my own code on the screen when looking at their system, but I also can't help but feel a little burn when I think about the endless (unpaid) hours I (we) put into this and the fact that companies like this don't even make contact with us, don't even give us credit, never mind give anything back to us: donations, code fixes/mods, thanks....
This is probably just the nature of how profit-oriented companies use Open Source to their advantage. The sword is clearly double-edged.
- Pat
Patrick M. Matthews Chief Executive Officer Excedent Technologies, Inc. Virginia Tech Alumni 866.EXCEDENT X 80 703.338.3600 (Cell) 703.991.4441 (Fax) http://www.excedent.com http://www.webmail.us
Read or subscribe to my blog: http://patmatthews.typepad.com
Mailing Address: Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center 2000 Kraft Drive, Suite 1300 Blacksburg, VA 24060
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