--On Friday, March 30, 2007 5:22 PM -0700 Frank Cusack fcusack@fcusack.com wrote:
Please don't mistake my email for any involvement with dovecot development. AFAIK, Timo is the one and only developer. That's sure to win over your board and boards worldwide.
If you mean a single developer might scare away users, I don't think that's the case. Plenty of popular software is developed by a single person or a very small developer group. And with open source, the loss of the developer doesn't mean that the application gets orphaned.
FWIW, in my experience, all 1.0 software is utter shit and should be avoided like the plague if stability is a requirement. So 0.99, 1.0, etc is all meaningless to me.
My concern is not quality but predictability. There's a reason 0.99 and 1.0 software is poor quality: Few people are willing to risk using it, so it doesn't receive widespread testing. More will use 1.0 than 0.99, and more yet 1.0.1. The "rc" on the end of the current dovecot is little better than 0.99 to those who insist on a 1.0. (It's psychologically better, but only just marginally better.)
I also don't seek more users out of some kind of popularity vote. I'm looking for the "many eyes" effect. With more people using it, more issues get identified. It's like sending an army of bots over a minefield, so I don't have to be the one losing a leg.