Invading CanIt's turf (was Re: [Mimedefang] Mimedefang/Spamassassin/MySQL Web Interface)

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Tue Jul 29 09:01:02 EDT 2003


On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Daniel Kasak wrote:

> While this sounds like a good idea, it also invades Roaring Penguin's
> market for CanIt ( which we are currently using under a 30-day trial ).
> I assume that since Mimedefang and Spamassassin are both released as
> open source, then there is no legal barrier to you producing a web
> interface to configure the 2, but I think it would be a great pitty if
> in doing so you 'stole' some of Roaring Penguin's customers.

I'd like to state Roaring Penguin's official position on this issue:

We released MIMEDefang under the GPL, and if someone wants to write
a database-backed system with a Web-based front-end, that's a natural
consequence of the GPL, and we wouldn't try to stop it even if we could.

That being said, I certainly would not merge the changes into the
"official" MIMEDefang release -- that's asking us to forgo our
self-interest a little bit too much. :-) Someone would have to
maintain this as a separate project, or fork MIMEDefang.  We'd help
out a little, but not too much.

Also, without meaning to brag, I'm confident that CanIt and
CanIt-PRO are about 12-18 months ahead of any possible free workalike,
(and better than any commercial alternative) and we'll try our
darndest to maintain that lead. :-)  I believe the people on the list
who have evaluated CanIt/CanIt-PRO will agree with this assessment.

Finally, a lot of people who would buy CanIt or CanIt-PRO wouldn't consider
using a free version anyway.  Yes, a free CanIt workalike would hurt us a
bit.  But it's a risk I knew we were taking.

Regards,

David.



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