competition

[Pascal Gienger]

Le 20 sept. 2010 à 15:59, Marc Patermann a écrit :

> Hi,
> 
> where does Cyrus IMAPd stand today?
> When I was starting to think about moving to a open source mail system 
> (migrating away from Lotus Domino btw.), there ware Cyrus IMAPd, Courier 
> and UW-IMAP I think.
> Cyrus was the only "full flavored" IMAP server with active development. 
> We were going the 2.2. path, while 2.3 seemed to "fresh". So there was 
> development.
> On the other side there were still many people complaining about Cyrus 
> being too complex and too unstable with all the BDB fiddlings.
> 
> Then dovecot emerged and quickly evolved. I don't know why,

I begin to be tired from this "dovecot is much more besser, you HAVE TO USE IT", why don't you migrate, ... ...?

For me, this is a typical open source crowd behaviour. If one product tends to have better results, change immediately on the faster running train (which is believed to run faster) and to dump the reliable solution immediately, beginning to do advocacy in all forums, newsgroups and discussion groups to tell people that the new product is even better than sliced bread.

Today it is dovecot, tomorrow it can be <insert new name of a superb new blinkenlights imap server project here>.

This kind of advocacy kills capacities, kills work time (because you have to tell to your boss why it is not a good idea to dump the existing installation only because another linux guy plotted out some coloured powerpoint slides stating that dovecot is the way to go) and focusses on the wrong side of the story.

Cyrus has been proven to be reliable for over ten years. The security record for Cyrus is quite high. It runs perfectly on our infrastructure. It is still actively developed. Until now, it does not hurt any performance barrier and staff is trained with it.
Just to change because numbers seem to be better or an IMHO arrogant founder offers "1000 euros if you can hack my server" (which is like being in a kindergarden from my point of view) is not a viable option. Image the cost of training staff to a new system. And even a "easy migration path" often turns out to get downtime. Downtime - for nothing you get "in plus" - no service will be "better" - it is far worse: as your staff isn't experienced with dovecot you likely will do more errors in administering ist.

As for a new installation, that can be another case. 

We are very satisfied with the performance and flexibility Cyrus IMAP gives to us. There's no need to change apart from being "in head with the open source advocacy croud".

-- 
Pascal Gienger     Jabber/XMPP/Mail: pascal.gienger at uni-konstanz.de
University of Konstanz, IT Services Department ("Rechenzentrum")
Electronic Communications and Web Services
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