OFFTOPIC Re: [Mailman-Users] Archive URL in postings (2.1b3)

[Jay Sekora]

> No, it's not. Not a bit. One of the things my organization does is 
> manage the email systems for our corporation (not a small one). and we 
> set policy on email clients quite simply: "here are the ones we 
> support. If you use something else, we wish you luck. If it doesn't 
> work right, we hope you can fix it".

That's an excellent strategy for managing support staff's workload,
and it's a strategy we use at my job as well.  It's a terrible strategy
to get a software project taken seriously around the world.  Imagine if
Python could only build on HP/UX, IRIX, and SCO Unix, using a particular
version of GCC that had the quirks that Guido liked and didn't have the
quirks he didn't like.  Would anybody be using it?

-j.

PS - Admittedly, Mailman is *already* taken seriously around the world.
But I don't think it has sufficient monopoly power yet that it can impose
this sort of a paradigm shift on email.  Actually, it's going to have
a hard time doing that as long as anybody also gets non-mailing-list-mail.
If it were a newsreader or a weblogging system, it would have a better 
chance, because people don't see their news or their blogs alongside 
their personal email, so it's not going to bother them as much if 
the semantics are different.