PGP Keyservers: The End of an Era

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3 pointsaustinheap2 comments

Is there a reason no one has gone down the reinplementation route? It seems that since no one is willing (or able to) write OCaml, the next best thing is a completely new decentralised product, or simply rewriting it. I personally feel like the latter would be much easier as design choices don't need to be made, and once it's finished, server maintainers can simply have a drop in replacement.

I think it has nothing to do with OCaml (there are a huge amount of OCaml enthusiasts and companies).

AFAIK openssl had the same problem. It's a trivial matter: hard job for no reward. Would you do it if the software was written in C or Python. I doubt that.

If there were a big bounty for renovating this software, people would do it. If there were a company supporting this software and paying to a developer (at least one) for maintaining and refining it, it would be fine.

It's pure economy. The same reason why emacs is evolving so slowly, for example (and emacs is extremely popular). If there is no company behind an FOSS which making money with it, this peace of software stagnates.

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