Bill Parker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Dave Sill wrote:
>>
>> Sendmail is *the* UNIX mailer. Everyone knows how to work it. It's
>> well documented, well proven, and hopefully most of the major bugs
>> have been found. We can tweak the source any way we see fit. Not
>> many (paying) customers are complaining about it. Sure, qmail is
>> better, but when we compare the benefits to the costs, it doesn't
>> make economic sense to switch.
>
>Ahem! if you are installing a system from scratch (as i did about 5 months
>ago) and you read horror stories about what a pain it is to admin sendmail,
>it makes perfectly good sense to install what you want when you are loading
>the operating system..:) In my case, i installed Qmail v1.03 and never have
>looked back (except for a few small problems, etc)..
Of course I agree completely. I was merely guessing at Red Hat's
reasons for not switching to qmail.
Remember, Red Hat is a big bux commercial operation (see recent news
reports of substantial investment in Red Hat by Intel). They don't
produce Open Source Software because they're nice guys and it makes
them feel good to give away their wonderful operating system. They're
in the business to make money. They do it by selling shrink wrapped
RHL, support services, and various LINUX add-ons.
To a certain extent, the quality of the components of RHL can affect
their bottom line: quality is something that some customers are
willing to pay for. But, as Microsoft, Netscape, and Red Hat's own
experience has amply demonstrated, the public is all too eager to
accept buggy, unreliable software. Clearly, quality isn't the only
criterion--or even all that important a criterion--to the average
customer.
If Red Hat was a bunch of geeks dedicated to furthering the hacker
ethic, replacing sendmail with qmail or even postfix or exim would be
a no-brainer. They'd evaluate the choices, pick a winner, and do
whatever it would take to implement the switch.
But Red Hat is more like a bunch of executives dedicated to growing
the business and raising profits. Their techies might argue for
replacing sendmail on the grounds that it would improve the quality of
their product and hopefully avoid some negative publicity the next
time sendmail is hacked, but that's not enough to justify the
switch. The executives will want to be sure that the costs of
switching are lower than the benefits of switching--otherwise they'll
lose some of their precious growth or profits.
So what are the costs to Red Hat of switching from sendmail to another
MTA? Here are a few:
o they have to select an alternative
o they have to test the alternative on a variety of platforms in a
variety of situations
o they have to incorporate the alternative into the next release
o they have to change various documentation
o they have to support their sendmail customers in the migration
There are also risks:
o what if users don't want to switch?
o what if the replacement has problems?
I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. From Red Hat's point
of view, the inertia behind sendmail is substantial and the mere
availability of a superior alternative isn't compelling enough to make
them switch.
-Dave
