Mark Sapiro writes:
I have had some contact [with EMWD], but not much. As far as I know, they are still in business and offering list hosting including Mailman 3 lists with Affinity and Empathy. They no longer offer support for installation and maintenance of Mailman on other people's servers.
That exactly describes my experience. To jaboyib556, I recommend you contact them directly and make your own judgment. I do not know the current operators of EMWD, but I do know that the Carpenter family carefully vetted several bids. And their concentration on servers they run suggests they know what they're good at and have focus. I think they're a good bet, but only you can judge.
As far as I know, it was only EMWD that did this and for business reasons, kept it proprietary.
I corresponded with Brian about this.[1] He said that a third-party consultant (not sure if they're related to the current operators) built the Affinity and Empathy applications in PHP on a limited budget, and he felt that he needed to keep them proprietary as a temporary "no competition" measure until they could build up a nest egg to support on-going development. He said, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that he thought it would take a year to build the reputation, another year to recoup the investment, and within that time frame he planned an open source release. I suspect he planned a Aladdin Ghostscript-like strategy: with the publication of release N, he would release N-1 as open source.
He made no commitments, but I believe that was his aspiration. He was always a great supporter of Mailman, giving generously of his time and expertise to people on our lists including those hosting with other businesses.
We miss him a lot.
Footnotes: [1] On friendly terms: "hope for an open-source release" is not a matter of moral imperative with me, and I believe I speak for all Mailman developers on that.