Spammers catching on

[Gyepi SAM]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 11:02:16PM -0800, Zack Brown wrote:

> Whatever you have in mind may *seem* like it will have less dependencies, but
> my experience is that such projects *always* grow into much the same thing
> (warts and all) as what they were intending to replace. If spamassassin has
> too many dependencies, and is difficult to install, it seems like the thing
> to do is submit patches to ease up those dependencies and make it easier
> to install. I'm sure they'd appreciate the help. If you find the developers
> unwilling to take your patches, *then* a fork or competing project might be
> warranted. But if you just go ahead and start a competing project for no
> reason, you'll probably end up with a mess:

I don't agree that competing project always become what they are trying to replace.
Some do and some don't. It depends on many factors.
 
Perhaps SpamAssassin's developers would appreciate patches, but after six years
of perl programming, I don't care to patch other people's perl code in my spare time.
 
> 1) new developers will be confused as to which project, yours or
> spamassassin, they should work on

Sure. The same situation exists for many other projects. Having choices allows
people to associate with the projects that interest them.
Users also have more choices. I am sure we can all agree that there is no single program
that fits everyone's needs.
 
> 2) existing spamassassin developers will resent you for not contributing to
> their project, and there will be bad blood (which, AFAIK, is not
> currently the case between spamassassin and bogofilter)

Shrug

> 3) you will almost certainly not produce a better spam filter than
> spamassassin

Alright, if you say so ;)
 
> 4) you will almost certainly grow a dependency set similar to
> spamassassin, as you attempt to deal with the hard problems.

The two projects share the goal of reducing spam but they differ in
so many other ways that I cannot see any truth to this statement.

 
What all this boils down to is: I am involved in open source projects for fun and 
work on what interests me.

-Gyepi