“Sendmail Inc. today released a new product aimed squarely at
the NT market. Version 8.9.3 of the sendmail mail transfer agent
(MTA) is the core of Sendmail for NT, version 3.0. And that new
product isn’t even open source. Why is a company that emerged from
the open source milieu and has always stayed true to its open
source roots interested in a proprietary operating system?”
“According to Wiley Hodges, product line manager for servers at
Sendmail, the people responsible for the sendmail MTA have always
been interested in having it work on as many platforms as possible
— even 18 years ago, when the sendmail program was first written.
He said that it is thanks to sendmail’s open source heritage that
the program has the cross-platform capabilities it does
today…”
“Although Sendmail still releases the source code to its core
technologies today, it is very much a commercial company, and it
has developed its own open source business model. Sendmail sells
service and support, and the Pro version of the program comes with
easy-to-use GUI configuration tools. Those who download the
open source version to contend with configuring it by hand — a
task often deemed formidable even by Unix gurus.“