Quality assurance.  If you buy a food product, you want to
know what it is made out of.  If you buy a house, you want
to know that it is built of quality materials.  If you buy a
car, you want to know what is under the hood.  If you use a
cryptographic algorithm, you want to know that it has been
verified by outside analysts.  We feel that a lot of very
poor quality software is currently sold because a lot of
software companies do not have to answer to their users.  If
an independent observer looked at the source code for web
browsers from Microsoft and Netscape and told you that the
source code behind the Microsoft product was just beastly
but that the Netscape code is very clean and organized, you
might be more inclined to choose Netscape’s browser.  Since
Microsoft does not release the source code for their
product, you do not have the option to evaluate their
browser.  The bugs in Netscape, on the other hand, have been
hunted down and eradicated by thousands of prying eyes.  We
are hoping that by making our source code open and available
that we will be held to a higher standard of quality and
that we will benefit by having some of our mistakes pointed
out by our user base.  This model has worked in the past for
MailMan and we hope that it will continue to work in the
future.