[Mimedefang] Builds for MacOS X?

[Philip Prindeville]

On Feb 8, 2014, at 8:33 AM, David F. Skoll <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

>>     I'm certainly not a fan of the "walled garden" which is a
>> major reason why I have an Android phone, but I'm pretty sure that
>> ship has sailed.
> 
> That's fine.  Then what I'm doing is a quixotic indication of my core
> values.


Which is definitely your prerogative.  But if the software contains community contributed enhancements, fixes, etc. is that a reasonable decision to make unilaterally?

What import does the will of the collective carry?

I’ve run into this scenario myself where I had a piece of software I had pretty much written myself and shared as OSS, but accepted fixes and enhancements.  I didn’t particularly want to support Windows, but I couldn’t be bothered to actively resist it (and some of the best contributions came from people working natively in Windows).

My compromise was to “partition” all Windows based support and someone else in the community took care of porting and compatibility issues, and would sign off on every new release that it either worked on Windows--or in a couple of instances where new functionality broke the Windows port and took more than a week to rework, documented the breakage so that an advisory could go into the release telling people to go back one version (i.e. a README.Win32 file).

It was an arrangement that I could live with, didn’t take any additional effort (other than some minor coordination/communication by a few emails every release cycle), and kept a very helpful contributor happy and motivated.

Economics being what they are, people sometimes take jobs for less than ideal reasons.  Myself, I’ve worked for Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, HP, Bay Networks, France Telecom… not all of which would have been my first choice. But a man has to live.

I don’t like Windows (despite having worked in the Windows kernel firewall team for Win7), but I’m not going to go out of my way to make life miserable for people who have to work with it out of necessity:  I have neither the time nor the energy for it. And it’s way too many people for me to paint with a broad brush and feel ethically justified in doing so.

And thank goodness for likeminded people: when I did work on Windows for a living, gcc, cygwin, and vim were my favorite tools… although ironically at the opposite end of the spectrum from Microsoft: they had marketshare due to being excellent tools, not because predatory marketing strategies had shoehorned anyone into having to use them.

-Philip