Daniels sniffed the urgency for content scanning when he was still an employee, before his second coming as Open Source one-man show. “The initial demand seed for Xamime came from pushy staff members within a large corporation I worked for, as an R&D manager,” he says. The corporation’s satellite offices were being dominated by NT servers, but there was increasing demand to produce a bidirectional inbound and outbound e-mail content scanner at the mail-hub, using Linux and Sendmail, for the sake of virus prevention and corporate e-mail policy enforcement.

The resulting product was Inflex, released to Open Source in late 1999, at the time the only scanner capable of bidirectional scanning in sendmail. Daniels found that demand for the product outstripped expectations The following year, 2000, the company collapsed, leaving Daniels jobless but not helpless. As with other Open Source devotees, he thought the what-if of doing business in Open Source. “The conversion from script-based Inflex to Xamime commenced.”

Daniels started his company, PLD Software, precisely to embody Xamime, Inflex, and all other related products to attract both commercial and public interest. Currently, PLD supports nearly a dozen Open Source projects. And it has real customers. Drawing power: With Xamime's GUI front end, existing non-technical staff are positioned as ‘administrators’ within five minutes, says Daniels. “Managers don’t ask technical details; they ask for end results. Being able to prevent Joe in Accounting from sending or receiving any attachments without breaking open the sendmail C source code is one of the simple things that administrators need to be able to do. Xamime gives that power to the right people immediately.”

Xamime provides an administrator with a minimized amount of information content per page via its graphical interface. Through this interface, Xamime enables administrators to deploy content control and e-mail usage policy rules quickly. “Xamime provides aspects of control which MTAs simply do not have, but everyone wishes they did have,” says Daniels. Almost all configuration files look incomprehensible, no matter how cleanly written. People are less repelled by GUI-based representations, he says, which greatly reduces what he calls “the fear curve,” not to be confused with the learning curve. But where there’s fear there’s no gain.

“The fear curve is important, because it acts as a direct inhibitor to learning,” he states.

So who’s buying? Daniels says that Xamime has attracted a group of customers and distributors. Customers to date have come from medical, legal, ISP, university, and textile sectors. Xamime also is working through distributors in South Africa, which is its fastest-selling market, Germany, India, United States, Philippines, and Australia.

The very fact that Daniels carries the ball on his own is quite impressive. We’re talking about an Open Source business where Daniels writes the manuals, secures the media of CDs, boxes, and license papers, talks to customers, and tracks bugs. “No, that doesn’t leave me with very large slices of time,” he comments.

Still, Daniels feels there’s no way for the business to go but up, based on sheer business needs. “Xamime strikes at the market segment which will become more important as legislation is passed that forces corporations and ISPs to become responsible for the content flowing through their servers. Xamime covers the areas of spam control, anti-virus, corporate espionage prevention, and improved resource utilization.”

There is resonance with the ‘proprietary tinsel’ strategy for survival. Eric S. Raymond in his open letter to several Open Source news outlets a year ago explained that hanging some proprietary tinsel off a product makes it psychologically easier for middle managers to sign their checks, perceiving that with a pricetag comes something real. Raymond continued: “If we were still in a boom time, we might still have the luxury of perfect doctrinal purity. But face it, people, it's pretty much raining crap out there macro-economically. Capital spending is in the tank and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. Until things turn around, Mr. Middle Manager is going to be even more conservative than usual and thus more likely to be penny-wise and pound-foolish in the way that particularly hurts us.”

Xamime contains two core programs, ripMIME and alterMIME, offered as Open Source under the BSD-style license, a choice that resulted in Daniels enlisting both Open Source developers and commercial support.

Don’t tell Daniels he’s limiting his chances by committing to Open Source: “By releasing useful, non-key components to the community, realistic testing outside of the boundaries of the original specification occurs, and this is excellent product proofing,” he says. “Patches and suggestions are received globally. PLD’s development capabilities through this external support is greatly extended. In return, Xamime becomes a more known product, with a stronger, tested core, providing more sales, which enables PLD to work on more projects for Open Source.”

If there are any growing pains, it is in learning that some customers are reluctant to spend on what is necessary. Programming is logical; business perceptions are not. “One customer had been spending upwards of $250 a week cleaning machines on which viruses had entered. Secondary costs were far higher, in downtime and lost data. Ironically, it took a lot of convincing to get them to buy Xamime, which would cost them $1,000. That was nearly eight months ago. Since then, they have only had a single ‘virused’ workstation, and have directly saved $7,000.”

Another customer achieved savings through reduced line usage because of being able to block out nonessential attachments. Yet selling is sometimes difficult, even in this eager market. “For reasons that defy logic, decision makers are reluctant to spend money upfront in order to gain savings, no matter how obvious or proven.”