David Harris (programmer)

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David Harris (born August 1961 in Dunedin , New Zealand ) is a programmer and in 1990 he made Pegasus Mail one of the first non-commercial e-mail programs available to the Internet community.

David Harris has been a software developer since 1983 and was employed full time at the University of Otago in Dunedin until 1993 . Before that he worked as a photographer. He lives and works in Dunedin .

In 1989 he installed an intranet for the University of Otago , based on the Novell Netware server operating system . Since there was no further funding for a commercial mail system , he developed the Mercury e-mail server and the Pegasus Mail e-mail program . In the following years, he made these programs available worldwide as freeware via FTP servers.

The development work on his mail system became so extensive that in 1993 he gave up his work at the university and devoted himself entirely to software development . Since Pegasus Mail and Mercury continue to be made available free of charge, he has since made his living selling manuals and support contracts as well as merchandise and donations. Mainly due to the free mail programs from Microsoft and the Mozilla project , which are anchored in the operating system or the browser suite, as well as the declining spread of Novell Netware compared to Exchange servers based on Microsoft server operating systems, the market share of his software has decreased considerably since the end of the 1990s. so that the financial basis for the programs and thus their further development is constantly jeopardized. At the end of 2006 he stopped selling manuals and support contracts and tried until June 2009 to finance his living and thus the further development of the software by selling Mercury licenses. Since June 2009 he has been looking for a constant annual funding for his work.

On November 15, 2002, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the PC World Awards in Auckland . From 2003 to 2006 he worked as an elected committee member in the New Zealand organization InternetNZ.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. David Haris : The Pegasus Mail Thousand - an open letter. . In: Pegasus Mail . David Harris , January 23, 2010, accessed April 23, 2018 .
  2. ^ David Harris : New Zealand: the clever country . In: Computerworld . IDG Communications , November 24, 2002, accessed April 23, 2018 .
  3. ^ Council through time . InternetNZ , archived from the original on February 9, 2013 ; accessed on December 18, 2015 (English, original website no longer available).