Month: February 2006

FOSS Means Business.

As DW writes over on his page, Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman are coming to Belfast in March 2006 for a FOSS event.  I will simply repeat DW’s post as we need to get more publicity for this event.

DW wrote: Ciaran O’Riordan of the Free Software Foundation Europe has announced that Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman will be coming to Belfast to speak on March 16th at the Spires conference center in the city. More information can be found at the FOSS Means Business web site. This promises to be a really interesting event to attend, if for no other reason than to listen to Stallman’s GPL v3 advocacy talk. It is a very rare opportunity for you to come along and learn more about what is perhaps one of the most defining moments for free software this decade. Entrance, thus far, appears to be free, or at least very cheap.

I’ll try to go and capture photographs of the event.

I noticed a referrer to my "Qmail is dying" article from http://thedjbway.org/qmail/qmail_at_eight.html where the author, Wayne Marshall,  refers to my post as "Qmail (sic) is dying".  For the record Wayne, I’m neither American, nor in America.

The obvious inference is that Qmail is not the correct spelling of qmail.  Lowercase vs Uppercase.

All I can say – if that is what you are reduced to in order to try to discredit an author then you are on very shaky ground.

Ignoring the obvious "Proper noun" grammatical issues, if you happen to search the  qmail Mailing List Archives (retained spelling from the site) the earliest reference I could find for someone saying it is "qmail, not Qmail" is 2001.   Many of us were using Qmail 8 years ago and nobody "corrected" it until several years later.  Too late.

If you also check the reference http://www.qmail.org site, you’ll find many references to Qmail – including Dave Sill’s "Life With Qmail" – I’d love to see if the first version of this referred to Qmail or qmail. 
Now the self serving qmail elitists push the "qmail" capitalisation. Who cares?

Ironically, the author also lists three 3rd party patches to fix "bugs" and declares "qmail seems pretty healthy to us".  Scary.  And people bitch at Microsoft for taking months to fix a bug.  We’re 8 years on with qmail and if Dan can’t bring himself to patch 4 lines of the code to fix 3 acknowleged bugs in qmail then I would counter that qmail is not in a healthy state at all.