At 7:16 PM 2/27/96, Blake Ramsdell wrote:
This also reminds me of a time when a call went out for the MOSS implementors to raise their hands (on the pem-dev list) -- and only Ned Freed answered. This could very well be because MOSS implementors don't hang out on the mailing list, which is somewhat strange since the timeframe in which this question was posed was very close to the release date of the specification (10/95). In fact, Dave Crocker recently said that "Clear, corporate commitments from product vendors ought to confirm or dispel the rumor of the MOSS demise", and we have not had *any* vendors step up since that statement.
Interestingly, I talked to the folks developing the Simeon IMAP-based MUA (the only cross-platform IMAP MUA that I know of; if anyone else knows of one, please tell me), and they told me that they knew of the conference and instead decided to focus on getting the next version of their client out the door. And they're claiming to be implementing MOSS, S/MIME, and PGP (PGP/MIME, I hope?). Pretty surprising answer, coming from a company that I think will be so radically affected by the outcome of that workshop and the continuing work done by the same community of folks. I don't even know if they've got someone subscribed to this mailing list (it sounds like they don't). I have no idea if the rest of the PEM/MOSS commercial community is like this, but I'm not sure it bodes well for them in particular. I mean, if it really is a matter of them being small enough that one key guy can't afford to take a few days out (like both Qualcomm and Z-Code did), then maybe they're too small to survive the shakeout. And if it's a matter of them not caring, well....
Don't get me wrong -- I don't consider myself to be prejudiced away from MOSS. Near the end of the meeting, I specifically pointed out that: First we had PEM, and it died. Now we have MOSS, which is 47 pages long, and less than *four months* old, and we are calling it dead also.
Somebody else made this observation about the age of MOSS at the workshop, and as I recall Dave's response was something to the effect of "Uh, it's actually a heck of a lot older than that, the difference is that the RFC has only been on the streets for four months." -- Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer <http://www.his.com/~brad/> finger brad@his.com for my PGP Public Key and Geek Code The comp.mail.sendmail FAQ is at <http://www.his.com/~brad/sendmail/>