RE:

[brad@his.com (Brad Knowles)]

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
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