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Dave McGuire
Mon, 02 Mar 2015 08:23:57 -0000

On 03/02/2015 02:38 AM, Oliver Welter wrote:
> Guys, dovecot is open source - if you desire a feature that the upstream
> programmer did not include, pay him a bounty to do so or send him a
> patch to be included. Period. We can discuss and mightbe somebody will
> fork if he is not willing to accept such a solutuion for any political
> reason.
>
> I am really tired of reading this kind of complaints on OSS lists.

  ....and this is perhaps the second most predictable knee-jerk response.

  I am certainly capable of writing such a patch, but there is no point
in expending the effort if it would not be included in the code base.
The extreme negative reactions to this idea from people in this
community, every time it has come up over the years, with almost rabid
ramming of fail2ban down posters' throats (Benny Pedersen's excellent
suggestion not included) suggests that a patch implementing such
functionality would not be well received.

  The idea here is not to whine until somebody pops up and assumes that
I don't know how the open-source software world works.  I assure you
that I do.  The idea is to mention, vocally, a different use case in
which fail2ban (again, excepting Benny Pedersen's excellent suggestion)
is not an appropriate solution, as many times as it takes to make people
realize that some networks aren't exactly like theirs.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, we fought the great assumption of "all the
world's a VAX running BSD", in which programmers everywhere wrote code
that assumed EVERYONE was running that platform.  Today we fight the
"all the world's an x86_64 box with a gazillibyte of memory running
Linux" mentality in exactly the same way.  It's not any more palatable
now than it was then.

                  -Dave

--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ/3
New Kensington, PA