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Evolution 1.0 Released
jdavidb writes: "I pulled up the Ximian redcarpet updater this morning and discovered that Evolution 1.0 is finally available! Now Outlook can start facing some serious competition, although there's still a long way to go. (Evolution does not yet emulate all the Outlook viruses, of course, nor does it integrate with Exchange Server.)" Here's Ximian's full announcement. Update: 12/03 14:59 GMT by T : Nat Friedman of Ximian points out that they're offering a software extension which does allow integration with Exchange 2000. There's good story on the new iteration of Evolution at NewsForge, too.
I'd figure that Lotus Notes would be a *no brainer* for Linux considering their backing of the platform. Does anyone know what is holding them back? Are they just trying to shoot themselves in the foot or what?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I like Evolution... really, I do. Except, I can't use it. We use Exchange at work, and there's nothing I can do to make Evolution work.
I think Ev v1 was roadmapped to integrate with Exchange -- since it doesn't it's not a viable option for corporates who primarily use Windows, but have people using Unix.
But, Exchange is not the be-all and end-all, tight integration with Lotus Domino would be excellent. Lots of big corporations use Notes heavily, and require a Windows client (Domino web services aren't great)
Perhaps an open standard for groupware (discussion, IM, calendar, to-do etc.) could be adopted, and through that Exchange/Notes -> new standard could be employed, aloowing other people to bring integration with whatever groupware server they want to Evolution and other clients?
Could be a very bad idea, but it's just off the top of my head!
Dave
Not until it runs on Windows and Mac...
Much as I love Linux, I don't think it quite has the same prevalence on the desktop.
Until it fully supports Exchange Server, it'll never be a serious competitor to Outlook.
Sorry, but face reality. In the corporate world it either has to be 100% compatible otherwise they just won't use it. Price is generally immaterial.
Plus any company who can afford Exchange Server will no doubt be able to afford licences for Outlook so the whole "but its free" doesn't really offset the fact that its not fully compatible.
However, in spite of all this, lets not knock them for a fine product. Always some work to do, but its definately on the right roads ...
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Well, now I need to figure out how to migrate my email from Outlook 2002 (not Outlook Express), to Evolution. I _think_ I've got a way, but not sure. Has this feature been added to a recent version of Evolution?
The previous way I figured out how I could do this was to fire up Eudora, as it could open Outlook 2000 email files (not sure about Outlook 2002) - then once you've got your email in Eudora's format (related to mbox format, as I recall - could be wrong), then it was easy to convert to a UNIX way of things. If Evolution doesn't do this automatically, it certainly should. That's one of the big challenges of moving people from MS software to anything else - converting those file formats with ease, and doing so _perfectly_, every time.
An exchange connector is a library with a familiar interface that will handle all connections with the exchange server. Now, this Exchange connector for Evolution is not GPL-ed software but proprietry closed source software. Because afaik in memory linking is also prohibited, how is Ximian going to solve any GPL conflicts? Or is the GPL not able to force its license on the connector?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Yeah, but as long as no one is under any impressions that Ximian actually have anything to do with opensource.
Ah... Maybe I'm venting, I've been watching evolution for soooooo long now and all the reports have seemed to imply that they where not interested in exchange because of closed protocol.
Seems to me of course is that they where stopping anyone from "scratching that itch" Opensource style.
Pffft. They can stick it where the sun don't shine. I'm gonna crack out that python and roll my own.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
AFAIK, your "dumb" place the place where gnome should go, according to the LSB.
I use PINE for my Exchange integration Email work. Works perfectly - apparently PINE is as much integrated with Exchange as Evolution is, until they start selling their component that'll connect to the calendar.
The calendar is the only reason I keep Outlook around, really.
My real problem with Evolution is, it looks like Outlook. I cannot use Outlook for Email. I find the interface to be completely horrible, unintuitive and hard to keep organized. The whole "Rules" thing just does not work. With PINE, if you want to save a message to a different mailbox, you hit "S <ENTER>". With Outlook you have to Drag'n'Drop. Imagine that for 200 messages.
Maybe it's because I've been using PINE for god-knows how long, but GUI mail clients just don't work for me.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I'm not trying to troll here, but I have strong doubts that Ximian will survive. But, before I continue, let me congratulate them on Evolution, as it is a very high quality product, and my preferred mail client.
From the newsforge article, quotes from Nat Friedman, vice president of product development:
"We expect less than we would have expected awhile ago. I think that people understand that businesses have to survive. And the people know that the bloody carcasses of Open Source companies line the horizon right now."
and
"It is proprietary is because they (Ximian) intend to make money from it."
Effectively what I see here is an admission that open source software just isn't getting the bills paid (at least for Ximian, and Eazel RIP), and that they need to sell proprietry software in order to keep afloat.
Unless we see open source companies like ximian generate significantly more revenue from services related to their open source projects, we just aren't gonna have the pleasure of using new products from them for much longer.
Don't you mean another twist in the "Linux getting ready for Joe User's Desktop" saga?
Let's ditch the in fighting eh, and concentrate on the real issue here.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
> I like to use a calendar aplication and a
> mailprogram but I see lite good in melting it
> alltogether in a single program.
I don't see anything wrong with making an application do multiple things so long as the data is stored in an open format.
Yes Evolution integrates email, calendaring, etc into a single app, but it doesn't mean you can't use something else to access the data.
For instance i prefer KDE as my desktop, and have KDE's AlarmDaemon running while i'm logged in. It uses the same calendar as Evolution, so no matter if i have Evolution closed i will still be informed of my appointments.
company releasing an Outlook clone. If you like it so much,
why don't you use Outlook in the first place?
I doubt that "Microsoft is evil, so make products that imitate
theirs" is that good a strategy. The world won't be any better
when every windows luser is a linux luser, people won't get a
clue just by switching their OS.
Where are the times gone when Free Software was about building
great programs that work, instead of caring about integration
with proprietary crap like Exchange? It's Exchange and Outlook
that are broken, not their free, standards-compliant counterparts!
I don't see any problem with charging for the Exchange connector. Think of it as encouragement to go open source!
Let's say you're a small company with an Exchange server. You pay for Exchange. You pay for CALs. Then someone installs Evolution and lets some of your people access Exchange without buying into the whole MS-$$-desktop licensing (I'm thinking support people, especially). You're still paying something, though, to make Evolution work with Exchange.
Then someone says, "You know, Evolution would work just as well with Courier/Cyrus/whatever as an IMAP backend, and then we wouldn't have to pay for the Exchange server or the Exchange connectors.
And there's your incentive to go open source.
Also, this puts the onus of supporting Ximian on the corporations, who can afford it. If I want to use Evolution for myself to access my IMAP server, it's free. If I want to use it to get into Exchange at work, I get my boss to spring for a license. I'm happy, he's happy, Ximian stays in business.
Caveat: Exchange still wins in the corporation until Evolution + Open Source server XYZ can provide shared calendaring and scheduling.
The description of this Connector makes it look like it might live on the server side.
Does exchange itself have a plugin architecture? When I used to be responsible for the care and feeding of Outlook clients the saddest thing was watching the parasitic developers that developed Outlook add-ons try to keep up with changes in Outlook. These, mind you, were Microsoft's friends, at least for as long as it takes for Microsoft to implement all the extra features of fax clients and remote access accelerators into Outlook proper. If Ximian intends to keep up with Microsoft on Microsoft's OS and groupware server, I'd reckon they're in for a wild ride.
Perhaps this connector will be a middleware Linux server translating between the Evo clients and the Exchange server. OK, now you're only trying to keep up with Exchange. Just remember to add the cost of a reasonably powered Linux box to the equation. Since this connector is proprietary, be prepared to get stuck with binaries that may not work with subsequent releases of the distro(s) they support. How happy would you be to admin a Redhat 5 box right now?
If this thing is client side, then it is surely an abomination.
"Things in the real world cost real money, son." Blah-blah-blah, this Ximian-Connector business still smells like bait-and-switch.
I hear chants of "It's not done 'til Lotus don't run" echoing in the distance.
I'm not forgetting - I'm discounting.
Outlook runs on top of Windows, which is not free. It's quite expensive.
Because of the way things are priced, companies usually end up buying Office, and therefore paying even more for Outlook.
If I understood the offer correctly, Microsoft offered to put computers in a lot of schools, where 20% was the hardware cost, and the other 80% of the money was required to put software on them. If you think Outlook is "free," you aren't paying the bills.
the community created an open source plug-in that
was analogous to connector?
As a side note, I think they've found a great balance between being open source and still selling code. Most of the mass of the app is free, and that rules.
But after having thought about it, I have no problem with this at all. I think what they are doing is something like what Troll tech or Cygnus has done -- having a complete Free product, but demanding payment when it's used in a non-free way. Troll and Cygnus have this with GPL libraries and providing alternate licenses for payment.
Ximian can't quite do this, unfortunately, since the GPL doesn't restrict any normal use, so it has to make the plugin proprietary. It's a shame that there isn't a way to do it otherwise, and it is dangerous to create precedence of proprietary plugins to GPLed products. But, I feel the basic intention is the same.
At some point, there'll be a Free program that basically matches the functionality of Exchange, and someone (maybe Ximian) will make a Connector for that. If that is proprietary, then we'll have something to complain about.
But until then, if Ximian can find a way to fund themselves, more power to them.
Well, there is the fact that they wrote a good portion of evolution, which is open source. So, in that sense they have quite a bit to do with open source, as they have written something that will give their users much of the functionality of Outlook, with the benefits of open source and hopefully a lack of all the security holes. Then everyone gets mad at them for not being completely and totally open source when the offer to sell a proprietary version of their connector in order to put some food on the table.
Personally, I think this is a great thing. The developers at Ximian have produced a product that is very usefull to very many people, and they have done it through the open source model. However, as has been shown by many open source companies deaths, pure open source does not always pay the bills. Thus they have come up with a fairly impressive way to fund their open source project. They get the corporate people and those who really want the functionality of connecting with MS exchange to pay an extra price to keep Ximian going.
I personally think that this is to be lauded rather than condemned. I would have much preferred to have the connector open source, as I would love to ditch windows in favor of linux for the use of exchange. However, I can see the need that they have as well...
I see two things happening because of this... the first, someone is going to start writing an open source version of the Ximian connector, which will force Ximian to either stay on top of things and keep making theirs better, or to open source theirs and find another way to get some money. The second, is that Ximian will come up with some version of incremental releases (or a license system much like Ghostscript), which would provide revenue from corporate sources and then release the source code for others to enjoy.
Then again, I might just be dreaming....
marc
The Mozilla guys had a good explanation of why 1.0 is special, at least for them. 1.0 means API freeze -- in the sense that the 1.0 API will be available at least until 2.0 (though it could be extended). This is not so important for users, but for developers outside the Mozilla project, it is critical.
Since Evolution has a plugin facility, maybe the 1.0 obsession exists for similar reasons. Now developers can target it with peace of mind.
-Paul Komarek