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Like this one from Popular Mechanics in 1954:

http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/Picfrom1954PopulareMechanics.jpg

"it's looking at whether Windows 7 favors Microsoft apps over third party programs"

Doesn't Apple very heavily lean towards Apple software?

(This isn't starting flaming, this is a legitimate question - what separates Apple from Microsoft in these regards?)

It's worth looking at Chandler (fat client) and Cosmo (server) from

http://www.osafoundation.org/

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally approaching a useable release and it's quite interesting. I think it will be a real choice in 2008...

My biggest questions: are there Windows programs that support these features via CalDAV, and is there a CalDAV server in FreeBSD's ports?

It looks like there are a handful of Windows apps that support CalDAV at this time. Since it's an open standard, it shouldn't be long before more calendar apps support it. As for the server, this is what I could find with a 10 second search. Looks promising, too.

The *REAL* Exchange killer will be CalDAV. Yet another proprietary calendaring/scheduling back end from Zimbra means competing with MS on their turf - and we all know how that always turns out. But when F/OSS apps implement open standards, they kick ass. Think HTTP/HTML - Apache. Think SMTP/POP/IMAP - Sendmail, Postfix, Cyrus, etc. These are the most important protocols and applications around. It's time to do the same with calendaring.

Proprietary calendaring solutions only extend as far as your local implementation. I want to coordinate my schedule with more people than that. I want my coordinate my calendar with my family, with my friends, with my vendors, with my collegues at other institutions, with local town events, with my kid's school - NOT just my co-workers. I don't want to care if they use webmail, crackberries, or whatever. This requires open standards. The standards exist. They are pretty new. Now we just need good reference implementations. If Zimbra does this, I predict they will own the market.

Bedework already supports CalDAV. Bedework/Sakai integration is taking place. Lightning and Sunbird work on top of CalDAV. CalDAV is happening. So Zimbra: please please please get on CalDAV, so we don't have to continue suffering the interminable curse of incompatible proprietary calendering protocols. As we've seen, when open standards take off, even Microsoft has to play along. It's time.

You're kind of thinking of Chandler, which could grow into an OpenSource Notes. IBM still makes real money with Notes, so they're not going to Open-Source it, but they will happily sell you an installation and a consultant in a blue suit.

Notes vs. Exchange is kind of one of those VI vs Emacs things; binary opinions only, and users are all willing to carry a sharpened Pike to defend their choice. What we really need is the email equivalent of the introduction of gunpowder to make this argument irrelevant.

Chandler seems like it will be a very good C/S groupware application.

see: chandler

I imagine that this phone would support CalDAV, as that is being touted as a new iCal feature in the forthcoming Leopard release of OSX. The iCalendar Server you mention is based around CalDAV. Theoretically, since Apple is making CalDAV a central theme with their iCal client and in their server, I can only assume that this smartpdaphone would be a CalDAV client as well, and thus be able to interface with other calendaring servers which support CalDAV.

It's named after Raymond Chandler, the mystery author. This is the URL that explains briefly in their own words: "Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler,) is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list."

As I said before, it is a screenshot of what "can be done" on OS X - e.g. what UI elements are available, and what options there are for doing custom-drawn controls/UI elements (such as a whiteboard). It puts a lot into one screenshot, and it's not necessarily an example of how to win an Apple Design Award.

UI design has little to do with the wx toolkit and a lot to do with how an application designer understands, cares about and adopts interface design principles. Tools are tools; they don't do your UI design for you, they simply help you implement that design. For something with a more OS X-style UI, take a look at this:

http://chandler.osafoundation.org/screenshot.php

However, they're still in the process of working on the application, and as a result there are still a couple minor bugs in their UI; overall, though, it looks quite solid and uses many modern UI conventions.

When you spend a few seconds looking into a toolkit, a lot of things can "seem" a certain way without really being true. wx is being used for modern app design, but that's mostly a result of projects like Firefox which have made a lot of developers start to re-think the importance of a good UI. As a result, there aren't a whole lot of totally finished modern UI apps to show off yet. (The commercial sector jumped on this quickly, of course, but they've got the resources for it.)

Having used wxPython for just a few small projects, and currently one very large one, I found that the book was appropriate for someone who was just getting started. WxWidgets and wxPython can do much more than this book would suggest.

I keep it on my bookshelf next to the wxWidgets book and end up reaching for the wxWidgets book more often, even though I'm using wxPython.

I agree with the other poster who suggests that people code GUIs with sizers instead of using the XRC resources, although if you have multiple people on a project, and one or two want to change just the GUI, then the XRC, along with Dialog Blocks would be a perfect combination. The trick to making the gui stuff quick even though it's in code is to configure your favorite text editor with snippets or aliases or whatever it calls them to have lots of fill-in the blanks templates for things like a staticText / Edit box row in a dialog. I have a good collection of VisualSlickedit aliases I'd be happy to send to anyone who e-mails me at: jim at maplesong dot com.

wxPython is easy to debug too. I'm coding my application partially in C++ wxWidgets, and driving the complex gui parts in wxPython. I have my wxPython extension dll in a visual studio project, and I point the "when debugging run:" to python itself, with an argument that points to my script. I can set breakpoints in my C++ code, and they are hit when I get to the right place in the wxPython gui. I can simutaneously use Wing IDE from Wingware to debug the python code. The trick is the python actually initiates the conversation with the debugger through sockets... the debugger just has to be in 'passive mode' to accept the connection.

Unlike the other posters, I have not run into anything buggy. Everything has been solid, and has made sense, and for the most part worked the first time every time, even mostly on OSX. (I start off on Windows.) The only troule I've had on Linux/GTK is controlling the font size in the HTML windows. (wxWidgets has a simple but fantastically useful lightweight HTML layout widget!)

I'm really hoping that Google comes around to putting some support into wxWidgets & wxPython. It already has great support from Mitch Kaypor and the OSAF, and AOL has used it for their communicator, and lots and lots of small shops have used it successfully, as well as several open source projects... Ok, it's doing fine.

-Jim

My experience with wxPython has been pretty positive. Sure, I have ran in to a few bugs in the Python API, and some in the underlying C++ that are merely exposed by the Python wrapper, but they have been easy to work around and they were fixed in later versions. Development of wxPython is very active, there are full time developers paid for by the Open Source Applications Foundation and lot of people using it both profesionally and at a hobby level.

The applications I have created with it fairly simple - Food File (a nutrition database) and Celebrity Magnet (an image search engine) - but I wouldnt hesitate to use it for more complex gui projects. In short, I'm a complete fanboy!

Will McGugan (blog)

What about Chandler? It seems largely to meet your criteria. It is multplatform. It includes individual and workgroup calendars that can be shared across platforms. It includes overlayed multiple calendars (crucial in my view, and poorly handled by Exchange) and manages a single event across calendars.

There is also Scooby for sharing Chandler calendar information with others. But PDA synching is not yet available.

What about Chandler? It seems largely to meet your criteria. It is multplatform. It includes individual and workgroup calendars that can be shared across platforms. It includes overlayed multiple calendars (crucial in my view, and poorly handled by Exchange) and manages a single event across calendars.

There is also Scooby for sharing Chandler calendar information with others. But PDA synching is not yet available.

I've been unable to create new calendars - from the Google Groups support list that particular feature is rather broken at the moment. Still, assuming Google fixes this, this could easily make Chandler redundant.

but no word about chandler. When it matures, it should be a killer email application.

Anybody remember Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation and their flagship product, Chandler?

It was supposed to be the personal information manager and groupware application that would trump everything, be free and run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

http://www.osafoundation.org/

It was supposed to do everything that Exchange/Outlook and Evolution could do, only in a much more intuitive and user-friendly fashion.

Where is it now?

ob. disclaimer: I've applied for a job at OSAF to work on Chandler.

ob. disclaimer: I've applied for a job at OSAF to work on Chandler.

We tried Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird with a WebDAV server (even though it deleted two calendars upon upload and barfed on a third, my office loves Sunbird's interface)

Actually, it is rarely *exchange* that corporations like--it's the functionality in Outlook that combines group calendaring and email.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to have Exchange servers to run Outlook clients if that is what the customer wants. In fact, the only "feature" of Exchange that is occasionally difficult to replace is its ability to incorporate VBAScript to customize it. Of course, that is also the source of much of its security woes.

Several companies have licensed the former HP Openmail and offer it with a few new wrinkles--and that would be an excellent way to go. There are other Exchange replacements, too, that would also work. As several have pointed out, Novell has mail solutions that would actually offer some advantages of their own.

In another year or so, I would look seriously at Chandler, as it may transform the use of email for many. It simply isn't quite there yet--but keep an eye on it. http://www.osafoundation.org/

Much better than LuPy is PyLucene which uses the actual Lucene libraries compiled with gcj and wrapped with SWIG, thus giving you Python beauty with Lucene performance...

Honestly one of the best ways to change the situation is to spend money and complain to the developers - open source or not.

A friend of mine has a company that supports about 8 or 10 law firms. All use more or less amounts of linux (mostly on the backend).

For example many lawyers use time tracking software such as time matters a time tracking and billing package that is windows based.

Postgresql is the database in the back end that Time matters supports. The performance is poor compared with MS SQL Server - mostly due to poor coding. What do you do? Call them up and complain.
It runs mostly under wine on the desktop, or typically we have it run under terminal server.

I would also have a look at www.osafoundation.org/ which will eventually produce a platform to do something like which you probably want to do. That is, easily customize your contact, scheduler and email system.

Another solution I've seen firms use in linux is based on Lotus Domino/Notes. Proprietary but runs in Linux. Often you can get 10 licenses bundled if you buy a new or used IBM server.

The Open Source Applications Foundation is working on a system that goes beyond calendaring, code named Chandler.

What's Compelling About Chandler: A Current Perspective

I find chandler to meet my calendering needs. Sure, it's 1000x slower than the DOS program it is supposed replace (agenda) when running on a modern computer, but that python interface is sure sweet!

Mitch Kapor isn't a happy man right now.

Chandler:
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_V ision.htm

Haystack:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/

It may just as fine - or even better - to wait for Chandler: Chandler

The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.

Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).

Updated Agenda?
For the younger /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?

• ... A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters. ...

Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.

Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.

lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.

The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.

Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).

Updated Agenda?
For the younger /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?

• ... A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters. ...

Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.

Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.

lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.

The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.

Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).

Updated Agenda?
For the younger /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?

• ... A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters. ...

Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.

Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.

lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.

The Chandler PIM is named after one of the all-time great detective novelists - Raymond Chandler. Check out the OSAF site .

One interesting new, very well supported project, is the Open Source Applications Foundation's "Chandler". OSAF is Mitch Kapor's baby and aims to provide a next-generation General Information Manager that can interoperate both thru servers and peer to peer.

Chandeler's skillset includes email, scheduling, contacts, documents, and more, all collaboratively, cross-platform and hugely extensible. Well, that's the plan, check out the latest release for yourself.

Oh, and how does this relate to the Mozilla projects? Probably pretty well as Kapor was the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

One interesting new, very well supported project, is the Open Source Applications Foundation's "Chandler". OSAF is Mitch Kapor's baby and aims to provide a next-generation General Information Manager that can interoperate both thru servers and peer to peer.

Chandeler's skillset includes email, scheduling, contacts, documents, and more, all collaboratively, cross-platform and hugely extensible. Well, that's the plan, check out the latest release for yourself.

Oh, and how does this relate to the Mozilla projects? Probably pretty well as Kapor was the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

One interesting new, very well supported project, is the Open Source Applications Foundation's "Chandler". OSAF is Mitch Kapor's baby and aims to provide a next-generation General Information Manager that can interoperate both thru servers and peer to peer.

Chandeler's skillset includes email, scheduling, contacts, documents, and more, all collaboratively, cross-platform and hugely extensible. Well, that's the plan, check out the latest release for yourself.

Oh, and how does this relate to the Mozilla projects? Probably pretty well as Kapor was the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

While schematized semi-structured DAGs of data may be overkill for many applications, you might be surprised how often something like this is needed, and how few developers actually have the skill to build it when it is necessary.

It is not uncommon for Windows developers to use a Jet database as their "file format", and just rename the extension to something else. Right off the top of my head I can think of three [1,2,3] apps that do this. CityDesk and ContentSaver would both be much better served by something like WinFS, as their data are not particularly relational in nature. Jet is also not easily fulltext searchable, doesn't give you eventing, is not scalable past 2GB...

The team behind Chandler (Mitch Kapor et al) have probably spent at least a man-year or two working on a repository with similar features to those intended for WinFS. From what I've heard, it's a nice piece of work, and they're hoping other developers will use it (i.e. not just for Chandler).

I myself spent much of last year working on a similar repository for version 1.0 of my company's application. It was an expensive task, but the result was well worth it, as our 2.0 product adds very different functionality and yet was easily built on the same storage foundation.

You can bet many others have tackled subsets of WinFS functionality for their applications. (Sleepycat's customer list would probably lead you to many of them.) The problem with everyone doing this on their own is not only duplication of effort, but it essentially closes the door on interoperability, since each implementation is in effect another proprietary file format. Not to mention that some of these problems are truly subtle and difficult, such as allowing concurrent access to sub-file-level items (fine-grained locks), replication and synchronization, etc.

[1] Diebold GEMS - http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/GEMS.htm
[2] Fog Creek CityDesk - http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/index.html
[3] Macropool ContentSaver - http://www.macropool.com/en/index.html

Chandler is an open source application that is intended to replace and revolutionize PIM and messaging. At least one team member worked on Lotus Agenda. So, with a bit of luck you might get in the near future a replacement for your Notes :)

sPh

take a look but at the moment is it worth it? problems in their development process and technology have appeared since I last looked at it post version 0.1. Will the Firebird+Sunbird combo make it irrelevant?

take a look but at the moment is it worth it? problems in their development process and technology have appeared since I last looked at it post version 0.1. Will the Firebird+Sunbird combo make it irrelevant?

sPh

There is no doubt that ECCO is still by far the most powerful and easy to use personal information manager. It's years old, but still nothing has come close. You can download it for free from NetManage now that it's orphan-ware at ftp.netmanage.com, also the full original distribution CD and documentation are available. If you Google for ECCO you will find an active community and nothing but praise for this great piece of software.

Coming up soon there is an Open Source project called Chandler led by Mitch Kapor that promises to be very good. It will have some of the ideas of Agenda and ECCO but updated for today's tech (all written in Python). A lot of eyes are on it...

Im eagerly watching the development of Chandler, which will be a step further in the concept of PIM. It's modelled after Lotus Agenda, whose designer works in this new project. The promised benefits of its first version are these:

1. Strong information management capabilities. Internally, OSAF refers to this as the "soul of Lotus Agenda". We will provide an extensible framework for users to categorize, organize and retrieve all types of useful information such as URLs, attachments, notes, RSS feeds, etc. in addition to basic PIM data types such as messages, events, contacts and tasks. This generic information type (or Information Item as we call it) will have many built-in and extensible behaviors. For example, any Information Item can have arbitrary ad-hoc attributes added to it. Users can also relate information items to each other in user-defined schemas.
2. Flexible and Extensible Presentation and Interaction Framework. This is a framework to allow the creation of task-centric documents personalized to a user's work habits. It includes a UI widget that is capable of querying for the relevant set of information items and displaying the related attributes and relationships of this set of items so as to provide the right context for the current task at hand. For example, the user can view a project view that displays all the messages (threaded topically), events, tasks and documents related to a certain project.
3. Power email features. These are features to help the user process and organize messages faster while shielding the user from unwanted or irrelevant information (e.g. spam). For example, we will add capabilities to have one-click disposition of email messages under a variety of circumstances. This is not a kitchen-sink approach. We will not add all possible email features or even all features common to popular existing email clients (e.g. support for return receipts and possibly even signature templates for emails). We will focus on features dealing with high-volume email.
4. Continue refinement of basic calendar and contacts functionality, focusing on how calendar and contacts inter-relate with each other and with other information items. This will further drive and validate our information management features
5. Provide sharing and collaboration features around information items (this needs to be further designed and elaborated)
6. Robustness and reasonable performance. Canoga will be our first release that should be safe for real data. We will have assurances about data integrity and recoverability. We will also ensure that future versions of Chandler will seamlessly accept Canoga repository data. We also need to ensure reasonable performance since we are targeting info-centric users who will process and store much more information than the regular user. Our goal is allow users to store and interact with a few million Information Items.

These veterans shared a starting-point assumption that the rest of the world is only slowly beginning to understand: While computer hardware seems to advance according to the exponential upward curve known as Moore's Law (doubling in speed -- or halving in cost -- every year or two), software, when it advances at all, seems to move at a more leisurely linear pace.

As Lanier said, "Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore's Law. Moore's Law isn't a match for our bad coding."

The impact of this differential is not simply a matter of which industry gets to collect more profits. It sets a maddening limit on how much good we can expect information technology to achieve. If computers are, as it has often been put, "amplifiers for our brains," then software's limitations cap the volume way too low. Or, in Simonyi's words, "Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty."

Most successful programmers are at heart can-do engineers who are optimistic that every problem has a solution. So it was only natural that, even in this relatively small gathering of software pioneers, there were multiple, and conflicting, ideas about how we should proceed in order to break that bottleneck.

Simonyi believes the answer is to unshackle the design of software from the details of implementation in code. "There are two meanings to software design," he explained on Tuesday. "One is, designing the artifact we're trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles -- the subject matter expert and the software engineer."

Giving the former group tools to shape software will transform the landscape, according to Simonyi. Otherwise, you're stuck in the unsatisfactory present, where the people who know the most about what the software is supposed to accomplish can't directly shape the software itself: All they can do is "make a humble request to the programmer." Simonyi left Microsoft in 2002 to start a new company, Intentional Software, aimed at turning this vision into something concrete.

Jef Raskin jumped in. "And what do they put on top of it? Another Windows!"

"What are they thinking?" Lanier continued. "Why is the idealism just about how the code is shared -- what about idealism about the code itself?"

At this point, Andy Hertzfeld, who has devoted himself in recent years to open-source projects like Eazel and Chandler, spoke up for the maligned legions of Linux-heads. "It's because they want people to use the stuff!"

His comment underscored something that's frequently misunderstood about the open-source approach, which is often wrongly stereotyped as loopily communal and out-of-touch with business reality. There's an essential pragmatism to the notion that programmers work best when they can share, and learn from, one another's work. After all, every other field of human endeavor works that way.

Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems."

Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard]

Chandler is "Intended as an open source personal information manager for email, calendars, contacts, tasks, and general information management, as well as a platform for developing information management applications". That's pretty much the exact same decentralized server-less information distribution and synchronization space Groove is in. Building that while sitting on the Groove board, well, the conflict-of-interest is pretty obvious.

By the way, not to join the tinfoil-hat wearing crowd but it was was widely reported several years ago that Notes' vaunted security was compromised in international (non-US) versions by including an NSA private key. Supposedly 24 of the 64 bits used in the keys were always an NSA key, thus leaving holders of the US's key 40 bits to crack instead of the 64 needed by anyone else. This news apparently caused consternation among non-US customers, especially folks like embassies and other government agencies. I don't recall how the whole thing played out, not even how valid it was, and probably worded it wrong, but I'd be concerned about Groove having a similar set of "privileged keys".

With all respect, I doubt any of these email clients belong to the next generation, they are rather of the current generation. The next generation includes Chandler from the OSA Foundation.

You could try using Ratpoison and screen. Of course, there are a number of projects that seek to change the way various information is handled/presented/etc. See, for example, Chandler, Haystack,Gnome Storage, and WinFS. These all seem to be addressing the fundamental problem of managing ever growing amounts of information on personal computers.

I think 2004 will also be the year when people can run Chandler

Well, a year and a couple million invested and all they have is a 'repository' and a (real ugly) 'gui framework'.

Check it out.

--t