Re: [hylafax-users] Damn! Hylafax, Multitech, and distinctive ring

[Lee Howard <faxguy@howardsilvan.com>]

On 2003.05.21 01:46 john andrews wrote:

> Being new to the world of faxing (2 weeks) I decided to go with
> hylafax
> (rather than the alternatives EFax or mgetty) because hylafax seemed
> to be
> more actively developed and 'enterprise ready'. In the light of the
> comments
> above is this analysis correct?

As for active fax development, yes.  HylaFAX is generally more actively 
developed than efax or mgetty's fax side.  efax gets very little 
development at all these days, it seems... 0.9a has been the "latest 
development release" since November 2000.

Both efax and mgetty approach faxing differently than HylaFAX, 
however.  mgetty supports Class 2 only in MH (1D-MR) only.  It does 
this because it tries to find the "lowest common denominator" for all 
modems to work reliably.  efax is similar, except that it does Class 1 
and MR also.  In each of these two packages the goal seems to be "turn 
your computer into a fax machine".  There is no client-server protocol 
(although Gert, of mgetty, desires to implement this), and really no 
ambition to support "extended" features such as polling, V.34, MMR, 
ECM, superfine resolution (although Gert also has considered this), 
batch faxing, etc.  Thus, they'd take quite a bit of building-up to get 
to a level where HylaFAX is for enterprise use.

As I tried to say there's considerable apathy when it comes to fax 
software development with almost all software and firmware.  There are 
a few exceptions to this, of course.  HylaFAX is being developed, 
unlike efax, and mostly unlike mgetty's faxing (the latest developments 
in that arena there were to support new Lucent-based hardware and to 
fix a queue security vulnerability).  MultiTech is developing their 
firmware... although sometimes not at a pace to even match HylaFAX 
development.  BrookTrout and Eicon and perhaps a few others are also 
developing their products, but again, it always seems like energy these 
days is more focused on data and voice support than fax.

If you want a perfect example of fax development apathy, try bringing 
up a Class 2.0 firmware bug up with 3Com/USR.  I have.  ;-)

So no, HylaFAX development is not stale, but there still is 
considerable apathy that it simply inherits from the rest of the 
universe for merely being fax-related.  Why do you think that SGI gave 
up the project ten years ago?  Why do you think, with its permissive 
license, that no other entity has tried to "run with it"?

Lee.

____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
  To subscribe/unsubscribe, click http://lists.hylafax.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
 On UNIX: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@hylafax.org < /dev/null
  *To learn about commercial HylaFAX(tm) support, mail sales@hylafax.org.*