[Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion

[Brad Knowles]

On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:00 AM, Lindsay Haisley <fmouse-mailman at fmp.com> wrote:

> My guess is that they don't put their top-flight people on either server
> development or server support.

I believe that they do have high quality people working on the development side, I think the issue is more on the support side.  And the fact that they don't want to talk to *ANYONE* outside of the server team itself.

>                                 Apple isn't know for servers, it's niche
> markets being audio recording, graphics editing and consumer desktop and
> laptop systems.

The irony is that they've done quite well on the server side, in the SOHO and workgroup business market.  Since Snow Leopard, the server version has been much cheaper than Windows server solutions, and they don't put any limits on how many machines you can use your licensed copy of the software -- which is why I always made sure to buy the group or family license (authorized for up to five machines), even though I was only using it one two or three machines in the house.

Apple's problems have historically been with the Enterprise market, as opposed to SOHO and workgroups.

>                  I've also observed, with somewhat limited experience,
> that Apple doesn't respond to complaints about bugs.  People bitched and
> moaned on Apple's user forum about a recent problem with video-induced
> kernel panics in Lion (which I also experienced) and Apple never
> responded, but the problem was fixed in a subsequent release.

Apple does listen to complaints and usually does respond, in different ways to different types of complaints -- also depending on how loudly people are complaining and how many of them there are.  Fixing a problem in the next release is one way they respond, another way is holding an impromptu press conference to explain why "Antennagate" is much ado about very little.

However, Apple frequently does not respond in the way that most people would expect or want them to.  I think a simple acknowledgement that there is a problem would go a long ways towards defusing a lot of the issues that have happened in the past.

>> but if they're going to make modifications to it, they need to share
>> those modifications back with us
> 
> Doesn't their failure to do so violate the GPL?

In this respect, I believe that they are probably in violation of the spirit of the GPL, but perhaps not in the letter of the law.  Which is probably why they are so very violently opposed to having any GPL-encumbered code anywhere in the company.

--
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>