“If American Express ever decides to revive its classic “Do you
know me?” campaign from the 1970s, Sendmail creator Eric Allman
would be the perfect lead-off spokesman.”
“Oh sure, Unix-savvy types know plenty about Sendmail, the
e-mail routing program that currently runs a whopping 75 percent of
the world’s Internet e-mail servers. First developed by Allman
during his graduate student days at the University of California,
Berkeley, the workhorse program has grown over the last 20 years to
become a paragon of the open-source software movement, exerting
Windows-like market dominance through low cost, reliability and
scalability.”
“When it comes to identifying the man behind this paragon,
however, chances are most open source folks would be lucky just
picking Allman out of a police line-up.”