SCN: Pegasus

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

==================

Note:  I've been using Pegasus for several years.  If you decide to 
try it, I'd recommend downloading version 3.12c, at least until a few 
version 4 problems get ironed out...

==================

(Eric Lee, Scottish Socialist Voice, excerpts)---In my column last 
week I mentioned an email program called Pegasus Mail. 

Pegasus Mail should interest socialists for a few reasons.  

First of all, it is absolutely free of charge.  Unlike, say, Eudora, 
which shows advertising, Pegasus Mail is completely commercial-
free as well.  

Second, it is not the product of some giant corporation.  Pegasus 
Mail was written by one guy - David Harris, who lives in Dunedin, 
New Zealand.  

Harris first wrote Pegasus Mail back in 1989 when he realised that 
the university he was employed by needed an email program. 
People liked what he wrote, it got passed around, and over time 
became one of the most popular pieces of software ever written.  

He says of Pegasus Mail that "it dates from the time when the 
Internet was a community rather than just a highway - when people 
helped each other without worrying too much about who was going 
to pay for it."  

Harris doesn't appear to have made any money from this.  He 
seems prepared to sell you a manual for the program, if you want, 
but that's hardly the kind of aggressive marketing one is used to 
these days.  But Harris has apparently sold enough copies of the 
manuals to keep himself going, and has devoted the last 18 
months to rewriting his software from scratch.  

Over those last few months, Harris has written tens of thousands 
of lines of code, made some 2,500 changes to the previous 
version, and in early November this year announced the long-
delayed release of a much improved version of the software, 
Pegasus Mail version 4.  

It many ways, it is a superior program to the ones produced by the 
giant, U.S.-based corporations with their teams of hundreds of 
programmers.  

Harris claims to have invented filtering for email, and Pegasus Mail 
still has a very powerful mechanism for sorting out junk mail.  In 
fact it's so powerful that you can easily use Pegasus Mail to run 
electronic mailing lists.

While corporations like Microsoft employ teams of testers and 
quality control experts, Harris relies on a network of volunteer 
testers who are given pre-release versions of the software.  

All of this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about how 
software works, or how the computer industry works.  

Bigger is not necessarily better.  Software you pay for is not 
always better than software that is given away for free.  

People are sometimes prepared to devote many hours of their time 
in a labour of love to create a computer program that is a proudly-
crafted piece of work - rather than a buggy, assembly-line 
produced piece of "bloatware"...

According to the proponents of free market capitalism, idealists like 
David Harris should not even exist.  They should not be writing 
things like this: "Giving away Pegasus Mail seemed to be a means 
by which I could try to make communication more accessible to a 
much wider range of people who needed it."  

If the capitalist view of the way things worked was right, Pegasus 
Mail should never have been created.  It should never have 
succeeded when pitted against products produced by corporate 
giants.  

But it did.  

For a decade now, Pegasus Mail has been the email program of 
choice for millions of Internet users.  

Today, with the commercialisation of the web, dominated by 
Microsoft and AOL, the act of downloading and using Pegasus 
Mail is almost an act of defiance, of rebellion.  

>From my point of view, it's not only the best email program 
available today - it's the one all socialists should use, and promote. 
 
More details about Pegasus Mail can be found at www.pmail.com.







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