Pegasus Mail and Linux / Open Source

With frustrations at the Microsoft way of doing business at an all time high, I think we will start to see more and more devs considering the possibility of moving to an Open Source way of doing things. Still, there are some hurdles that need to be addressed before this transition is said to be a smooth one.

As discontent with Microsoft’s “business practices” grows, we have seen unprecedented interest in alternative solutions for operating systems and applications. As a natural consequence of this, I have received numerous, or maybe even innumerable requests for a Linux version of Pegasus Mail. As a corollary to these requests, I have had a lot of people suggest that I also move to an Open Source basis for maintaining the Pegasus Mail and Mercury source code.

In the past, I have taken a cautious “wait-and-see” approach to the idea of Open Source. I am now willing to accept that it is a valid model, and that it is producing some genuinely excellent packages (such as FireFox, of which I am inordinately fond). Ideologically, I believe that Open Source and I are a good match, and I would like to consider going that way.

There are still some major problems with the idea of going Open Source though: the most important is “How do I survive in an Open Source environment”? While Pegasus Mail and Mercury do not require a huge amount of money to develop and support, the fact remains that they *do* require a level of funding, and I am not entirely sure how this would work within an Open Source model. I feel it is significant that the majority of Open Source initiatives are either funded externally (Mozilla), or basically not funded at all (OpenLDAP, OpenSSL): it seems to me that while Open Source is an excellent technical solution to the problem of large-scale development using widely-spread teams, the area of Open Source business modeling is one that still has not been completely resolved. [Read the rest]