This lore is BEYOND cool and Wietse is legend…
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On 27 Mar 2022, at 15:00, Wietse Venema wrote:
Viktor Dukhovni:
On Sun, Mar 27, 2022 at 09:08:53AM +0530, Amarjeet Anand wrote:
What?s the story behind choosing the name as ?Postfix??
One of the stories can be found here:
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibm_takes_on_sendmail_with_secure_mailer
...
IBM calls the new mail program Secure Mailer, but it is actually
one and
the same as Postfix, which is the same product as VMailer. IBM?s
lawyers
nixed the VMailer moniker because it was too similar to another
company?s product.
...
This sounds plausible. As for why "Postfix" and not, say,
"Platypus", I
don't know.
We tried a bunch of names for which I could register a domain name,
and each time the IBM naming authority would reject our choice.
Changing the name of a program is a lot of work; it is worse than
changing the name of the main character in a story.
Then we found out that a different IBM team had open-sourced their
PKIX code under an external name "Jonah". So we gave my code two
names: the approved internal name "IBM secure Mailer", and the
external name "Postfix". "post" was a different word for "mail",
and "fix" was for Sendmail, the inspiration for my efforts.
Wietse
