Claws Mail FUD on alt.comp.freeware
Of course, don't believe everything you read, especially if you read it in a newsgroup.
The Claws Mail 2.6.1 thread on alt.comp.freeware is full of it. Susan Bugher writes of Claws Mail/Sylpheed-Claws and Sylpheed, "I've been trying to sort out the current situation with these apps", but apparently didn't think of asking anyone on the Claws Mail development team. "It used to be that both Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws could be found at: http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net/ …"
The truth is that Sylpheed could never be found at http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net; the Sylpheed tarballs were, for a short while, being mirrored on SF, but they were always hidden and couldn't be viewed on the Files Page. This stopped when Claws Mail and Sylpheed went their separate ways.
"The Claws team seems to have taken over at SF", she continues.
More than that, the Claws team didn't recently take over at SF, but started the whole Sylpheed-Claws thing at SF and were in charge from day one.
"Thanks, Susan, for finding this out", says Jeffrey Needle, funnily enough.
Later in the thread Jeffrey Needle says, "I think they're selling short by not supporting Windows, but that's their choice." The use of stocks and shares terminology is an interesting one, since the whole freeware thing is about free as in free beer, and shows their lack of understanding of or lack of respect for free as in freedom. Free beer is great, but in the morning you find that you're still surrounded by the same old shit, and that hangover doesn't make it any better. Besides, we do our bit to help make things easier for the guys over at the gpg4win project.
Mon, 23rd Apr 2007 11:06:01 +01:00
This is surely worth making its way into a claws-mail default .signature, I'd say. Thanks for the great work from another pleased claws-mail user.
UsingCheers,
Kris
Mon, 25th Jun 2007 13:38:24 +01:00
WHAT ARE THE REASONS THAT THE CLAWS DOES NOT SUPPORT WINDOWS? THANK YOU.
UsingTue, 26th Jun 2007 10:02:40 +01:00
karim29007:
I cannot speak for the rest of the Claws Mail team, but only give my personal view.
Claws Mail is free software released under the GPL license. The GPL comes with a certain philosophy, often summed up by the well-used phrase, "Free as in Freedom, not free as in free beer." It is with Claws Mail as it is with many apps released under the GPL, you do get your free beer, as it is available at no charge to the user, but the free of charge is simply a (very welcome) side-effect of the greater freedom maintained by the GPL licensing.
All of the Claws Mail team give up their spare time to work for free, (that is, at no charge), on Claws Mail.
As the philosophy of the windows operating system and microsoft is the antithesis of the GPL then I have absolutely zero interest in spending any of my time working on a windows version of Claws Mail.
UsingTue, 26th Jun 2007 10:24:59 +01:00
karim29007,
rab is right, we simply lack spare time and (a bit of) interest in working on the Windows port. There's a Windows port of Sylpheed-Claws 2.4.0 available from the gpg4win bundle (http://www.gpg4win.org/), and I know that there are some plans to update it to recent version of Claws Mail. Porting needs time and efforts, it's not trivial at all and that's why we can't provide a recent version of Claws Mail for Windows.
Anyway, if you have time, interest and competencies (or willing to learn how), you could contribute and help, you'd be welcome.
Using