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A L S O__T O D A Y The 21st Challenge No. 16 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Mystery misdirected e-mail - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Discuss the programs you can't function without and why in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out BarnesandNoble.com's fabulous selection of Computer Books ___________________ R E C E N T L Y What does technology want? By R.U. Sirius Kevin Kelly talks about his "New Rules for the New Economy" (12/10/98) Is Rio grand? By Janelle Brown With the new MP3 player, the future of online music distribution is here now -- it's just a bit slow (12/09/98) Internet activism, Czech-style By Mark Schapiro The Communists are yesterday's target -- today, it's the phone company's Net-access rate hikes (12/08/98) Car talk By Chip Brookshaw Microsoft puts Windows on a diet so it can fit in your car radio -- and hold a conversation (12/08/98) Event Horizon's Web gamble By Patrizia DiLucchio Can a publisher of blue-chip science fiction for smart readers make it online? (12/07/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Make money fast on the Internet!

__y o u ' v e__.g o t__.S.e n d m a i l   ERIC ALLMAN'S FREE PROGRAM MAKES SURE YOUR E-MAIL GETS THROUGH. NOW IT'S GOING COMMERCIAL. BY ANDREW LEONARD | You may not know the name Eric Allman, but your e-mail does. Allman is the author of sendmail, a venerable program that shoulders one of the Internet's most crucial grunt-work burdens -- moving mail. No matter what ends up in your mailbox -- multilevel marketing spam or a birthday note from your mom -- sendmail almost undoubtedly helped it get there. Sendmail isn't the only such "mail transport agent," but it is by far the busiest, installed on an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the Internet's mail-server computers. And, like so many other programs that make up the guts of the Net, sendmail has always been free software -- that is, the underlying source code to the program is freely available and modifiable by anyone with the will and ability to do so. To call the original sendmail "free software," however, is to get a bit ahead of the story. Twenty years ago, when Allman first cooked up the program to solve a local problem at the University of California at Berkeley, the concept of free software didn't really exist. Certainly, Allman had no idea that his program might one day be singled out as a prime example of the "open-source" strategy of software development, nor did he imagine that he would be lauded as one of the pioneers of the free software movement. Back then, Berkeley was famous for free speech, not for free software. But Allman's creation, and later distribution, of sendmail did fit in naturally with the glorious hacking tradition of the computer science department at Berkeley -- where mucking around with the innards of the Unix operating system was long considered, if not a God-given right, then at the very least a cherished responsibility. And that Berkeley tradition is a key wellspring for what has since become known as the free software or open-source movement -- which is stirring up today's computing world with a new vision of how great software can be developed, distributed and supported. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Berkeley programmers constructed a template for how open-source software development might work, and proved that collaboration and nonproprietary coding could result in quality software products that endure the test of time. Well before Richard Stallman, acting out of his own deeply felt moral and political beliefs, explicitly kicked off the free software movement in 1984, Berkeley had already demonstrated why sharing source code made practical sense. So when Eric Allman announced last March that he had co-founded a company devoted to producing a commercial version of sendmail, the open-source community raised its eyebrows. The source code to this new commercial version would not be made public, although Allman and his co-founder, Greg Olson, declared that Sendmail Inc. would continue to support and improve the open-source version -- the Sendmail model, they said, would be a new "hybrid" business strategy. Last Monday, Dec. 7, Sendmail Inc. released its first "pro betas" of the new products, Sendmail Pro and Sendmail NT. Sendmail Inc.'s corporate headquarters is in Emeryville, Calif., a developer-friendly enclave squeezed between Oakland and Berkeley along the east shore of San Francisco Bay. The office itself is a friendly reminder of the changes currently rippling through the commercial software landscape: It was once part of the sprawling complex that houses Sybase, a company that specializes in proprietary database software. While Sybase is shrinking, open source is expanding. Allman's own roots go back to the town of El Cerrito, just a few miles north of Emeryville. A local boy, he serves as a prime example of the particular strain of hacker culture that flourished at Berkeley -- pragmatic, creative and utterly immersed in Unix. N E X T_ P A G E .|. The Berkeley Unix credo -- "If something's broken, don't bitch about it -- just fix it."