Building an Open Source Company One Penguin at a Time
Bill White · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2007
Roaring Penguin Software Inc. started as a one-person consulting company in 1999. A year later, David F. Skoll, the company's President and CTO, was asked to develop an e-mail filtering tool. David developed MIMEDefang, an e-mail filter that used Sendmail's Milter facilities. David donated the code to the open source community, and kept developing MIMEDefang as a free tool for system administrators. Today, the MIMEDefang code is available at at the website. By 2002, it was obvious that there was a need for a packaged mail-filtering solution suitable for end-users. David decided to go ahead and write what became CanIt-PRO. Whereas MIMEDefang is suited to system administrators who are familiar with Perl and comfortable with writing their filtering policies in Perl, the CanIt product line allows end-users to control their filtering through a simple web-based interface. The company transformed itself from a consulting company to a product development company. This transformation required significant changes.