Pegasus and Mercury Circling the Drain 217
Daemon Duck writes "One of the web's oldest and most respected email clients is flickering out of existence. Pegasus mail and its companion SMTP server, Mercury32, have been discontinued due to lack of funding for the ongoing development. On the website, the author David Harris states that if some funding becomes available he would consider opening the source code or continuing the development."
Why not open it now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
One might be inclined to think Pegasus is flickering out of existance because is isn't open source. I remember early on moving from Pegasus to Eudora email because Eudora's simplicity and features were better. When Eudora became an advertisement-laden mess, the open source Thunderbird showed up to fill the gap and I haven't looked back. Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago. Evolution in action.
Re:long time user. (Score:5, Insightful)
The post is really just an attempt to get some money. The fact that he would continue to develop it if he were paid probably goes without saying. However, he's also saying he would "consider" opening the code if he were paid enough, suggesting that if no donors come forward, he would simple delete the code and completely kill the product. This suggests to me that he's not really interested in open sourcing anything, but that he'll write that he will (if paid) in order to increase his chances of getting press on open source-centric sites like Slashdot.
Is it so complicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
>but I fail to see the connection between open
>source and him getting paid.
1. One or more people want it to be open-sourced.
2. The author (like you, unless perhaps you are
a monk) wants money.
An exchange either will or won't happen.
If there aren't enough people in #1 above, or if they
don't want it badly enough to pay, then maybe he will
eventually give it away for free, like something that
wouldn't sell in a garage sale or on EBay.
He doesn't have to give his work away for free if
he doesn't want to.
Re:What does funding have to do with making it ope (Score:5, Insightful)
He may be considering the inevitable time investment that would come from helping people actually understand the released source. Or (though less likely), there may be IP rights involved.
Re:Why not open it now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opening the Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of people seem to be asking this, but the question that they don't ask is this: is the source to Pegasus and Mercury 100% an original creation of David Harris? If not, he may have to pay off other authors who wrote libraries or other code written by Harris. One reason so much of the Netscape source code had to be rewritten to produce Seamonkey (and ultimately Firefox), aside from so much of it being crufty, is that there was a ton of third-party code that came from Sun and other companies.
Re:What does funding have to do with making it ope (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, what would Pegasus do that thunderbird or outlook doesn't do? Would it be better money spent writing custom plugins for thunderbird?
Re:What does funding have to do with making it ope (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to use this program a long time ago. It was a very good program.
1. Holding it hostage? He wrote it so he can do with it what he wants.
2. He did a lot of work. He would like to get paid for his work so funding is important. Things like food, mortgage, health care....
So it comes down to this. He will sell his work to the community if they pay him. It is his work so he has that right. If no one wants it enough to pay for it he is going to walk a way. If you don't like it use thunderbird.
These programs have been around for a long time. I used it on a Novell V3 system for email.
A rather hasty reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
The only money he ever asked for Mercury was for a set of manuals. I never needed a set of manuals, Mercury is easy to set up and use, and of course the mailing list is a good resource. I think a Donate button in Pegasus and Mercury would have kept him much more interested. As someone on the Mercury list said, if Pegasus Mail has 1 million users and everyone donated a dollar, that would make things much more interesting. Mercury was stagnating, new versions were few and far between.
Takes some work to open source something. (Score:4, Insightful)
I finally got the source code for Post Road Mailer (native OS/2 application). Before I can start working on it, I have to build a project file for Visual SlickEdit, then linting (or is it de-lint) it, then port it over to Watcom or Gcc. There may be some legal some issues that prevent me from open sourcing it, but I hope to get it working well enough to start distributing it -- legally, free as in beer.
There's nothing wrong with making money. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some other programmer: figure out a way to shoehorn an existing open-source editor, or a new one, in place of the one that's been removed. Sounds like a good thesis project for a comp-sci student somewhere.
I don't fault the guy for wanting to make money, I really don't. (I work on closed-source software to pay the bills, and we don't even give it away free-as-in-beer.) But he's not going to win any friends by holding the code effectively hostage; since he's not known as being an OSS developer, he's going to have to take the first step if he wants to receive funding from people who are ideologically motivated in that direction. A good first step would be opening up whatever code is his to release in whatever form it's currently in, just to prove that he's not playing Pit and the Pendulum with the Delete key on the whole project.
Re:Opening the Source (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody ever guaranteed that any particular piece of open source would compile.
Gratis vs. Libre (Score:4, Insightful)
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
A dying breed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Will the day ever come that we treat works of great software engineering with the same reverence that we treat 'traditional' forms of engineering? If someone unearthed an Abacus they would giddily rush it to their local museum. If they unearthed pristine copies of VisiCalc floppies they would probably be pissed off that somebody buried trash in their back yard.
Re:Opening the Source (Score:2, Insightful)
You must be new here.
Re:There's nothing wrong with making money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should he care what you think? Honestly your post is a great example of why he would do it.
If he just released the code in a currently unusable form all that would happen is people would complain about how crappy it is. That is the problem with most free software users lately. They feel that by using a free program they are doing the authors a favor.
Frankly I just hope he hits delete. Hell he is even helping write migration tools for current users free of charge.
What a bunch of ungrateful people users are.
I hope him all the best and thank him for the gift of his time and talents.
Re:long time user. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
I have no idea why he is shunting down but stated that he is have some money problems. You also don't know what is happening in his life that forced him to stop this free development.
So you have gotten years of use out of this program and you paid how much? He is offering continued support to those that have paid for subscriptions until there subscriptions expire.
Seems to be that you for some reason think that you are owed something for using a free program.
It just boggles my mind. Heck you can even keep using the version you have for as long as you want. You have lost nothing.
Re:Evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago.
I can't help but express my disappointment that this is still an issue. Spellchecking should not be implemented on a per-application level. It should be implemented at an OS level and offered as a service to all applications (along with other such services). I mean sure it's nice to have spellchecking in your mail client and your word processor, but what about your chat client? What about in vi? What about in your Web browser and calendar and graphics program. More importantly, why should you have to train dictionaries for all of these programs separately? I already taught my layout program that MPLS isn't a misspelling, why should I have to do it again and again? And what about my grammar checker? Should I wait another four years until they add that to Thunderbird? What about online dictionary lookups, and thesaurus, and language translations, and bibliography references? All these things I can do today in most programs on Mac OS X, which is great, but it is high time Linux and Windows caught up. That would be evolution in action.
Re:Says something about motivations. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Evolution in action (Score:3, Insightful)
The downside is that they take ages to install and don't run with computer-like efficiency.