[Mailman-Users] Mailman on Mac OS X Server 10.3: Outgoingmessagesstuck in qrunner/in folder

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Todd Zullinger writes:

 > Brad Knowles wrote:

 > > We can tell you what the Mailman-standard was is to start them, but
 > > Apple has created their own code to manage this aspect of Mailman
 > > operations and they haven't shared that with us.
 > 
 > Apple does provide the source code for their mailman packages.  You
 > can browse it here:

We're not talking about "shared" as you will find it defined on
webster.com, this is "shared" as used by Richard Stallman.[1]
"Sharing" is active contribution to the mainline, it's not merely
posting your code for others to pick up and analyze.

This usage makes some sense, because the creators of a forked product
have already done most of that analysis.  That doesn't mean they're
not liable to substantial additional work, of course, and open source
doesn't oblige them to do it.  But by the same token the Mailman
developers are forced (by lack of resources to do such analysis
themselves) to take the position that this code hasn't been
contributed to the project, so they can't know much about it.

 > So, while it seems fair to say that many of the very knowledgeable
 > folks here don't know the specifics of the Apple packaged mailman, it
 > doesn't seem quite as fair to say that Apple hasn't shared their
 > changes.

It's not "fair", but that's the customary usage of the verb "to share"
in the parts of this community that I frequent.

 > Compare that to cPanel where the best you find if you're not a
 > customer is a half-backed and outdated patch (which I was provided
 > only after persistent requests).

Sure, Apple is doing the open source thing by the letter of the law,
and that is no small thing.  But the problem presented to the
maintainers of the mainline by Apple's fork is of the same variety as
the problem presented by cPanel.


Footnotes: 
[1]  No, I don't approve of this usage, that's why I attribute it to a
famous extremist.  "Extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice."<wink>