On Thu, 2004-07-08 at 18:39, william(at)elan.net wrote:
Direct funding and grants for the group is not the approach taken by most
opensource projects or in general public internet technology development
communities. Typically its not the group that receives the funding but
individual participants receive support from companies (that may use of
these or other opensource technologies) and provide them with place to
Yes. My work sponsors SPF through the use of rack-space and bandwidth
for hosting the three SPF related sites I am responsible for
maintaining. (libspf.org, libsrs.org, and more recently the SPF Adoption
role site spf.infinitepenguins.net)
work and/or continue their research. The company then receives publicity
and recognition for their support. This is what I think should be done for
SPF as well and if Microsoft wishes to participate and is willing to hire
somebody and offer him/her work or provide grant without requing the person
to work on what microsoft directs him/her to do but instead allowing the
person full freedom to produce work as part of open standars, then we
should welcome their participation (although I've never before heard of
Microsoft doing this for anybody working for on opensource project or any
other internet standards that do not concern microsoft patented work)
Microsoft is somewhat of a problem for us... they have lots of money, in
their version of any given game, there is a 1st place, and then a big
pile of losers.. you either win or you loose. It has been my experience
that they generally only get involved when they know/think they have the
upper hand and can win unconditionally in effect my statement is that
its always about money. Whilst I have remained open minded about their
motivation for their recent interest in our project, I shall not forget
about the greedy and evil marketing machine that runs the MS beast.
They are a big circus trained cat thats purrrrring in front of our
fire.. how long is it before someone here gets mauled? Hrm?
I don't think I'm being unfair here either. No company should be in
control, no matter what they toss in. All monies received should be
gifted with nothing more than credit in return, and that warm special
feeling they can take home to bed with them every night. And of course
said monies should be looked after by a group of people furthest removed
from any monetary interest in this project, or mail period.
And as for taking monies from spam companies, I'm afraid I'm at odds
with Meng there. "SPAM" is a multi-billion dollar industry### and don't
you forget for a moment that those who best capitalize on it (IMO its
not the Spammers who are making all the money... its the leeches selling
shoddy software *cough* symantec *cough*) don't want it to stay that
way. Why do you think it is that its taken so long for anything to
happen at all as regards spam? Isn't it great when we can just pretend
to solve a problem and dole out money on a "subscription" that doesn't
really seem to do anything but cost you money and MORE of your time?
### One company, Ferris Research, says the cost is $10 billion in the
United States this year. The Radicati Group estimates the worldwide cost
at $20.5 billion. Another firm, Nucleus Research, shoots higher. By its
reckoning, the economic cost is $874 a year for every office worker with
an e-mail account, which multiplied by 100 million such workers amounts
to about $87 billion for the United States.
I also don't see any necessity to hire programmer at this time as number
of implementations available for different platforms shows that there is
enough initiative by individuals and companies to be able to support
standards produced for both open source and commercial products.
I don't see a need either, HOWEVER, my wife would probably swear I count
mechanisms and modifiers instead of sheep to get to sleep at night ;)
Ok not really, but I do spend much of my spare time working on things
SPF related. It would be pretty sweet to be paid to work on SPF full
time however unrealistic that might be. For now, its a hobby, and a fun
one. I shall continue to work on SPFv1 until doing so would become
futile.
I'm warming up to the idea of ISP's pitching in some money. I believe
since AOL has enjoyed basking in the spotlight that is "SPF" I dare say
it wouldn't be a half bad idea if they actually contributed some funds
if it were really necessary to facilitate the continued progress we've
come to enjoy to date. Now don't read too deep into what I just said,
AOL has done wonders for us already, and we certainly appreciate it!
That doesn't mean kicking down some coin wouldn't hurt -- and it would
definitely extend their time on the beach ;)
Official programming work may also overshadow alternative implementations
which may result in loss of interest by maintaners of such implementations
and as a result reduce tecnology innovation.
Whilst I can see where you are coming from, I don't think there is much
to fear. Take a good look around you and see what has been accomplished
by Open Source. Now there has been money involved, but the majority of
the work has gone on free of charge and in earnest. I don't see this
changing were a commercial work to commence.
I've been working with a variety of hardware vendors who are
implementing SPF. Some have opted to use my library, some have opted to
simply use it as a point of reference when implementing their own. At
the end of the day, what really matters is that the forgery problem in
SMTP is addressed.
Competition is a great thing, and I would attribute it as being probably
the single largest source of motivation for me when working on a
project. Competition can be healthy and often results in a better
product or idea etc... however, its not all fun and games when the
competition gets a little too serious.
I actually quite enjoyed the 'libspf-alt' project. Wayne did an
excellent job of writing an implementation that was not only named
appropriately, but was substantially different in both approach and
design. However, that being said, its quite clear that there is a bit
of serious competition going on here. I've been trucking right along
with libspf much like I have since day 1, but now I'm having to deal
with Wayne & Co. and their insubordinate behaviour as is painfully
evidenced through the blatant theft of title of my library, attempting
to appear as to officially deprecate or supersede my work.
At any rate, long story short, money or not things are complicated when
people let irreverent behaviour get the better of them.
One last thought would be to say that I am impressed with the level of
organization that this working group has operated under, and it is to
the credit of not only its leader, but also its participants. Despite
the above stated abortion of good judgement as regards project naming
conventions, we all seem to manage to remain productive and continue
moving forward.
Cheers,
James
--
James Couzens,
Programmer
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