German Government Commissions KDE Groupware System

tankengine writes "The German government has ordered a full-blown open-source groupware solution for KDE, to be delivered by the end of this year. It will consist of a server made of standard OSS components (Apache, Postfix, LDAP, etc) called Kolab, and a KDE client. The contractors are aiming for functional equivalence to MS Exchange and Outlook 2000."

Comments

Re:Well its official...

[gamorck]

But thats the biggest problem sir. Why do you think people keep running back to MS and Apple for their desktop computing needs despite all the free shit the open source community puts out?

One word: integration. Every Open Source app or linux distribution which "utilizes existing projects" to make something new ends up coming off as a hodge podge of different programs strung together with rolls of duct tape. Granted RedHat is attempting to deal with this issue in their upcoming 8.0 release much to the dismay of the KDE developers - but the open source community is still quite a long way from understanding THE TRUE benefits of tight OS/Application integration and truely reusable components.

I can assure you that if KroupWare (what a moronic name) just strings together a bunch of preexisting components into a larger app - then it will come off as some hackjob POS and won't be accepted by market in general. Not to mention the fact that we have government contractors responsible for this....

J