[Tutor] ethics in programming

[Stephan Richter]

At 06:10 PM 1/12/2002 -0500, kirk Bailey wrote:
>This is a fair question, and deserves an answer.
>
>Mailman cannot append advertisements, nor manage the rotation of them.
>
>If you want your list service to earn enough money to pay for itself,
>it has toeither SELL list service, or earn revenues from
>advertisements appended to the traffic passing through it.

Well, that might be a nice feature to have. :-)

>And, As I needed a scripting language for 'glue' and cgi scripting
>anyway, I took it on myself to learn the best language for the task.
>PYTHON. Although there are still plenty of things to learn, I am well
>on my way.

Well, now you are touching on something that I have been working on for 
Mailman. While Mailman comes with a native Web interface, I developed a 
product for Zope (www.zope.org) that allows you to manage and handle 
mailing list straight from Zope. You can develop an entire Web application 
and integrate Mailman in it.

>And, building from the ground up, I had complete control of how it
>worked, and could insure it did what I wanted, the way I wanted, and
>when done I would have DEEP understanding of it, how it worked, why it
>worked, and why it was that way. This also translates later into a
>marketable skill- building a list server for others.

Well, I used to think like that too. But at one point you realize that 
reinventing the wheel is not as cool as inventing it. So actually providing 
a new component reach many more people, due to the established community. 
And one more thing, often specialists of various areas working on these 
open projects, having knowledge that you might not have the time for to 
acquire.

>And, having had a distasteful experience with a product controled by
>someone else, by creating a tool myself I could insure I could always
>change it, and not have a problem with a primadonna messing up my
>goals withhis/her ego. That STILL leaves a bad taste in my mouth, 3
>months later.

Well, I think that is the cool thing about Open Source. One can do whatever 
he likes. A lot of my products for Zope will never make it in the core, but 
still many people install them, because they are helpful.

>But thanks for asking, I welcome the opportunity to clarify things.
>Always feel free to ask me anything you like.

Well, then I would like to ask you to look into an integration with 
Mailman. OR, since I will meet with Barry next week about Mailman, send me 
a detailed list of features you need and I will address them for you.

Regards,
Stephan

--
Stephan Richter
CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student
Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management