Mitch Kapor Joins Ximian Board of Directors

miguel writes: "Today we announced that Mitch Kapor has joined our Board of Directors. He is one of the co-founders of the EFF and Lotus (You can learn more about Mitch here.) In other news, I want to point out guys to our Latest Evolution beta which comes with SSL support (IMAP and SMTP), Pilot syncing and LDAP in the default build. The team at Ximian has been busy fixing every bug you guys have reported (feature requests will have to wait until 1.0 ships, we are in feature freeze now) and we are closing bugs faster that you can report them. What are you guys going to do about this huh? HUH?"

Comments

impressive work

[johnycanal]

Nice work. Evolution is turning out to be a sweet piece of software. Any idea when we can start building our own iCal servers? I haven't seen much open source iCal server activity out there.

I can't wait to boot the exchange box out the door.

Re:impressive work

[po_boy]

The reefknot folks are building tools to allow you (and others) to do that kind of work and more. Their work is coming along pretty well. Keep an eye on them and perhaps help them out.

Love it!

[Starky]

While there are strong sentiments about the desktop choices, it is important to the Linux community that there is a choice. I think in the long run, it will be a positive thing.

I think KDE is fantastic, but I simply prefer GNOME. I've been watching GNOME make incredible strides in the time that it's been around, and I think as a GNOME user I have alot to look forward to.

I have also been using the Ximian desktop at home, and I think they've put out a great product. (I actually forked over $29.95 to Ximian because I valued their product so much I thought it worthwhile to purchase it.) Red Carpet has worked flawlessly for me so far. While I still like to build certain things (Apache, Perl, etc.) myself, it saves me a good deal of time not having to worry about keeping my packages up to date. Evolution still has some bugs, but it's getting more solid literally every day. I was happy to fork over some money to Ximian and I'll continue to do so as they improve their product.

I know that there are going to be Debian users telling me I can get Red Carpet for free via apt-get, and they are right. I know there are folks who consider KDE the superior desktop, and they've got alot of good points.

However, I prefer Red Hat, Ximian, and GNOME, and Ximian has put out the right product for my preferences, and I am happy to pay for it confident that they will use the money not only to enhance their product, but to create things that will give back to the community as well.

So I say keep up the good work, Ximian, from a very satisfied user.

Re:Why Use Ximian?

[steveha]

My understanding is that Ximian is merely a 'distro' of GNOME.

More or less correct.

So, why would I use Ximian instead of GNOME?

Um, this is like asking why you would use Red Hat instead of Linux. Ximian is a distro of GNOME. When you use Ximian you are using GNOME.

To answer the question of why you would use Ximian, let's consider how you can get GNOME:

You can get GNOME from your Linux distribution, and then get updates only when your Linux distro provides an update.

You can get GNOME stuff as sources, and build on your own machine.

You can get the Ximian GNOME packages, and get updates from Ximian.
If there is a fourth option, I cannot think of it right now.

So, if your Linux distro provides you with updates as often as you wish, just stick with that. If you like building from source, go ahead and do that. If you want updates more often than your distro gives them to you, and you want someone else to build the packages for you, go with Ximian.

As for me, I use the "unstable" branch of Debian; and I get updates within a few days of any new release. Debian had Gnumeric 0.71 within two days of when it was released. So I have no interest in getting Ximian packages. But I think many people find it convenient to get updates from Ximian.

steveha

Re:Evolution and IMAP

[rudedog]

Evolution doesn't do that for me. With a mailbox with 1200 messages, it took about 10 minutes over a DSL link to get the headers. The next time I ran Evolution, it only took a couple of seconds to open that folder. I can't say the same for kmail, which does download the headers every time. Evolution also lets me see all of the folders on the server if I check the "override server's namespace" option and set the namespace to be empty.

This is all against a Cyrus 2.0.16 imap server.

Re:Credit where it is due

[ryantate]

Pretty much word for word from this article.

Thanks. Would only that the author of the original post had seen fit to credit, with a simple link or even simpler "lifted from Red Herring" attribution, the original work by Deborah Claymon.

Not that the post author was trying to pass off the article as his own -- the line (For more on Mr. Barlow,see "What Does John Perry Barlow Do?,"March 1998) would surely have been deleted were that the case -- but it would be nice to show some appreciation for the person who researched this piece and for the site that provides it completely free of charge.

Kapor not perfect

[maggard]

Not to throw any cold water but Mitch Kapor's record is not perfect. He was pretty much pushed out of Lotus. He then went on to found On Technology which was going to revolutionize the world.

The On Platform was developed with much money and some very big names. It was basically reusable software components - they lasted a few years in a couple of products, the company continued to blow through money and was sold off and now has nothing in common with the original. The breakthrough tech has long since dissapeared.

Since then he's had mixed success mostly trading in on his old-man-of-the-industry status. It's great that he's joining Ximian but this guy has had his share of misses along with a spectacular hit a generation ago.

Disclusure: I was hired the day On was bought from Kapor but never worked for him and his former staff seemed genuinely fond of him