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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."
They have been working on a similiar project called Aethera for awhile.
_ _
What has happened to this project?
I use Evolution everyday and found it very nice. The screenshots of Aethera look really nice and the interface from this screenshots look pretty damn intuitive.
Has anyone ever used Aethera?
How does it stack up to Evolution?
_______________________________________________
ACK
Just to be clear, will the finished product be freely available to all? I read the article, and it seems that way to me, but I'm unsure & don't want to get my hopes up too much.
It certainly seems a little farfetched to expect that out of the blue we'll get an Outlook/Exchange replacement at no cost.
I think that's the sound of hundreds of M$ employees spitting their coffee all over their monitors.
A Linux-based Exchange-a-like would be a God-send to me, and I suspect to many others too. You can get some of the way there at the moment with IMAP and LDAP, but as has been gone over ad-infinitum on this site the calendar side is completely lacking at present.
Cheers,
Ian
The contractors are aiming for functional equivalence to MS Exchange and Outlook 2000."
At long last. KDE will have all the security issues of Exchange and Outlook. We'll see which OS has the most viruses now!!
Moderators: please read this.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Since the groupware server will be assembled by existing OSS offerings, there is likely no requirement to use the supplied client if one does not want to. Indeed, if it's all open protocols, Evolution should be able to work just fine with it as is. Other (partial) clients should also be perfectly usable. This mix-n-match possibility is really one of the great strengths of OSS.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
My first reaction what that they're reinventing the wheel. Then I saw that they're going to be using and extending many current KDE components. *IF* the KDE teams takes these changes/modifications and uses them to build a new base, great. If, however, this becomes essentially a fork of current Kmail, Korganizer, etc., I don't see this as a good thing.
And yeah, why not take Aethera and build on that - it's already more integrated with itself and other things, and I'm sure the Kompany could have used a nice gov't contract just as much as the team that got it (maybe moreso).
creation science book
My big chance at karma whoring:
More info available at kroupware.kde.org
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The big news isn't the client. It's the server. Bringing all the available standards together into one server that a client like Outlook or Evolution can use is what's missing. Companies have no option for a good colaborative groupware server other than Exchange and Lotus Notes. Notes is a viable option, but myself and others do not like using it's client at all.
Point being, what they're creating (or bringing together) is the only server for Linux/Unix which will directly compete with Exchange.
Developers: We can use your help.
This is a very good development. As a business user, I can tell you without a doubt one of the biggest things holding Linux on the desktop back is the lack of a good groupware client on the order of Exchange - Outlook functionality. They've become very entrenched and people like them.
Hopefully this will turn out well!
Have a Happy.
Look in :* Architecture Paper 1.0
Search for point "5. Windows Client".
Look at the history of cars and paved roads for example. Once there was enough cars on the road, the need for well paved roads became a public utility. Same is true for gas, water and electricity. Once it starts going that way, people's tolerance for non-standard ways becomes a huge issue.
then again, I could be smoking crack and this is just more PR bs.
It'd be great if this KDE effort were also compatible with Apple's current efforts (Address Book (LDAP, vCard), iCal (iCalendar), Mail (IMAP).
mbbac
Calendaring is the one add-on application that all Exchange sites use. It must be usable, well-thought -out, and provide full multi-calendar/multi-site functionality.
If they manange that - say goodbye to Exchange.
sPh
There's something about the Germans that makes them good at software engineering, in fact any type of engineering. Of the open source projects I've seen, some of the best ones have been German. They should make a good job of this.
I've been thinking that the Mozilla project should do something like this. They have the resources to handle an Exchange replacement. Imagine "Mozilla Server" which is a single-install replacement for Exchange/IIS; it uses existing OSS components like Apache but ties them together and simplifies configuration. The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.
Of course since the source and the standards are both open, many other clients would be able to access the data as well. But I think Mozilla/Netscape is enough of a force in the OSS world to set the standard for a project like this. I'm not sure KDE is.
You know, I'm always told how having calendar functionality is essential to the corporate environment. And I agree, completely.
I'm surprised however that people rarely seem to think it's useful purely on a personal level though. I would love to have one calendar, net-accessible, on a machine that I control, which can be utilised by a number of different clients. Web-based, client app for Linux, client app for Windows, client app for OS X...whatever. Same for contacts and address books, and the same for task lists too.
Tracking time is not just a corporate thing. It really is useful at the personal level too. I know there are free calendars available at places such as Yahoo, but I rather baulk at putting such information onto someone else's servers. No - an Exchange-a-like is the way to go, and these people seem to be doing it.
Point of this post is - don't just think of scheduling software as a corporate tool. It's useful in your every day life as well.
Cheers,
Ian
From the kroupware koncept:
...
"ProFTPD offers good security features such as change root environment and a fine granular access configuration.
It's only functionality on the Kolab server is the legacy mode to enable Windows clients to publish their free-busy lists via anonymous FTP on the server."
Anonymous ftp access? Kiddies, start your pub-scanners!
You'd think komputer konsultants kould kode up a more sekure solution.
They do say its disabled by default, but since we all know there will be "legacy" systems around for years, they'll have plenty of wide-open boxes. Why FTP anyways?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Really, if you think about it, this is the obvious step.
At some point, it becomes cheaper to just write your own version of the software than to pay the per-seat license fees that MS and other commercial software vendors charge. If you're a large organization (or a consortium of really large organizations), writing your office apps in-house is economically viable. It's even moreso if you've already got open-source components to work from.
And open-sourcing everything--even if you aren't legally obligated to--costs nothing and often means that you get free additions to the project.
Why when people say, "Oh, let's make a replacement for Outlook/Exchange?" do they so readily forget about Public Folders... It wouldn't be so hard for me to convince people at my job to move away from Outlook/Exchange, but we have massive business rules written into the Public Folders, that we can't just "do away with".
Oh, but they have. This project is being pulled together by utilising existing projects, each of which have been running for considerably more than a few months. This seems to be a 'tying-up loose ends' affair, rather than a push to develop things from scratch.
True there's plenty of tying up to be done, but then that's why this project exists. The situation doesn't appear to be as bad as you believe it to be however.
Cheers,
Ian
Your post is a bit troll-ish but you raise some points worth considering.
I suspect that there is a market for a strong Exchange 5.5 replacement. There are a lot of midsized organizations out there (50-1000 people) who are running Exchange 5.5 and often NT 4 domains. They don't want to upgrade Exchange, because full implementation of Exchange 2000 requires Active Directory. And they are either satisfied with Novell eDirectory (NDS), or they just don't want Active Directory and the complexity it brings. And that is not to mention the Licensing 6.0 issues.
So, many of these sites are looking at Samba and other Open Source solutions when NT 4 goes off support. But the problem is not NT Server - it is Exchange. How do you replace that? Most sites only make light use of the groupware features, but they do make SOME use - particularly the calendar.
So, if an Open Source product is developed that can replace the core functionality of Exchange 5.5, I think you would see quite a bit of demand.
sPh
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
The real value here, though, is that the KDE project will now be defining a bunch of standard interfaces by which open groupware will access its back end services. Even if they don't get the back end perfect the first time around, by the time they're done they will have a very detailed set of specifications for the rules by which an open groupware client will talk with an open groupware server. Sure, there are standards for the basic protocols -- IMAP, SMTP, etc. -- but there are no standards for things like, which IMAP folder contains your task list? What's the URL to find another user's free/busy times?
I think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel project, which aims to provide an easy-to-install groupware server; we're doing it as a single integrated server instead of stringing together multiple existing unintegrated packages. So my view on this is admittedly subjective.)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Because if you do, all the software running the show was made by gov't contractors (like myself).
Gov't contractors aren't gov't employees- they are real businesses that get paid by the gov't.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Closed source, yes it would. However, with open source and a crowd of other people very interested, it would be very quickly up to standard.
See my journal, I write things there
To be delivered by this year? IE, done in three months? This seems a tad ambitious. The article doesn't specify the deadline, so where does that come from?
I still see a problem. How many companies run plain generic Exchange? Even my small company doesn't. We use things like BlackBerry devices and other plugins. Without those most companies will still run in to issues when migrating.
what? it sounds like a national government doing public-good.
not everyone or every country believes that all needs should be met by private-for-profit entities..
only americans (like you probably are) would find this at all a problem...
personally - i think its * terrific * news.
(oh, btw, did you know that the DoD (your gummint) floats ALOT of subsidy to private USA companies..?)
Why "disturbing"?
Governments have done this for years. Except that they ordered their software from companies that programmed closed-source solutions. They have to be customized for government use anyway. What's different with just wanting it to be Open Source?
IMHO, this is a very good thing, because this software developmnent is paid for with German citizens' tax Euros. So if the result can be used by other citizens as well, I wonder: Why have they ever bought something else?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Aethera is in the Debian unstable packages list
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
With my government, I pay for corporate welfare and software patent clowns.
How can I redirect some of my tax money to go to Germany?!
When I worked in an industry that supplied steel makers with key components, most countries had a limit of the percentage of those components that could be imported. Once your reached that limit (say 40%) you were required to build a factory in that country to continue as a supplier.
Now, classical economists and super-free-traders will argue that such behaviour is inefficient and non-rational. And indeed, those policies are one of the reasons there is such a glut of capacity in the steel industry. But no country wants to be caught in a conflict and have its source of key {stuff} choked off. The same thing is playing out in military aircraft.
So perhaps the German government doesn't want to be held in thrall to a US supplier.
sPh
I dont fully expect KDE to deliver the entire product free to everyone
:)
You should.
It's going to be completely (L)GPL, just like KDE. Development is taking place on KDE CVS (in its own branch), which is publically available for anyone to see and participate in.
However, note that it isn't a volunteer project; Germany contracted a company to deliver the product by the end of the year (I'm pretty sure there are some KDE guys employed there). This is a great thing; some KDE devs get paid to deliver a really useful project for any and all to use! Bravo, Germany!
Oh, and they aren't starting from scratch; they're starting from kdelibs, kmail and korganizer.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Looking at the road map Aethera is due for release any moment
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I know this post is somewhat redundant, but I think it's worth noting, that the short term solution will be the Bynari Plugin for Outlook but the longer term solution will be a separate stand-alone open source client for windows. Which will replace Outlook completly.
WONDERFUL news.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I have but one thing to say that even M$ hasn't really dealt with:
ALLOW THE FUNCTION OF CREATING CONFERENCE ROOMS AND LOCATIONS THAT CAN BE SCHEDULED AGAINST.
The only was I have seen Exchange pull this off is by having a user created for each account and keeping an outlooks session open for each conference room, then setting the conference room account to Auto-Accept invitations.
For the love of dear god please tell those german contractors to put this function in!! I am in a building right now with 67 conference rooms and I can't count how many times a room gets double, triple, and even Quad booked!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If Evolution is a replacement for Outlook clients for Linux, why not create a server componenet that runs group calendars. This seems to be the only piece missing from a total Linux server replacement for Exchange. If Evolution can sync this info with exchange, why not create their own server to do the calendaring also? then we would have a complete server client groupware solution. HTML calendaring is not a solution, many companies and users like applications that can launch events and real time syncing.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It is directly aimed at replacing Windows and Outlook/Exchange by giving the German government an effective countersource for this software. Standing alone, that is not bad - iff, they kept the software to themselves.
Your sophistry aside, by NOT going for a closed-source solution and introducing the software into the public domain as Open Source, the German government is entering into a competitive arena currently being served (for the most part in businesses and governments) by software created by private companies.
Economically, it is an unnecessary intrusion into the private market.
And by simply pointing out that governments have done this for years does not excuse this fact.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
"Kroupware"... Wasn't Windows95 internally nicknamed "Chicago"?
Maybe they should call this baby something like "Cologne".
(ok.. maybe even "Kologne". *g*)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Mozilla seems to have all of the functions of their client except the small bits (Tasks, Notes, Palm Sync) already, and it's stable, well-integrated and tested. It also runs on Windows, Linux and other platforms, allowing you to have the same client everywhere (less support load.)
It seems odd to cobble all these disparate KDE projects together instead of using Mozilla. But maybe this is because the KDE developers are more familiar with them. Still, I'm sure someone will make Mozilla work with Kollaborator server, or whatever it's called, soon enough.
Gerv
Hopefully this will start a trend. This is a very altruistic move on behalf of the German government... to commision and pay for the design of software to suit their needs, yet design and develop the project as open source, so that once it is done everyone around the world will be able to benefit from it.
We should try to get the US government to declare all contributions to open source development as a tax writeoff. Heck, maybe they already do, but somehow I think I would have heard of it by now if they did.
If this project delivers, the Exchange server at our organization will be in the dumpster before the hard drives have a chance to fully spin down, and I'll be running a shiny new copy of SuSE Kroupware in its place.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
This project is excellent news.
It marks a new direction in the way OSS applications are built.
One advice to the project team:
Do not be shy of compatability.
Make sure it is easy to migrate from MS products.
Make this an explicit and highly visible feature.
Provide MS-like skins as standard.
Ensure interoperability.
Make the migration path easy and people will take it.
Remember that businesses, like governments, have no loyalties.
Only interests.
And saving money is always a good message.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
About a year ago, I decided not to use "closed" and the word "standard" together anymore.
"Closed specification" versus "Open Standard". That's what I use now. Sounds clearer, better, doesn't it?
...and therefore it is impossible to "unfairly" compete against them. They put themselves in a position where all legal competition is perfectly fair and allowable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I don't think it's out of line, or uniquely American, to fear the government entering into direct competition with known economic paradigms--and that's what we're talking about. When the US subsidizes a company, its intention is not to displace an entire sector with whatever it's ordered, ie. we take a bid for a jet, which is a standard product that can be produced by a number of US companies. The production of the jet hurts no other sector of industry.
On the other hand, with this paradigm, there is the *risk* that the government starts displacing companies by releasing a free product. On a bigger scale, it would be like the US paying a lump sum for a technology that creates free cars for everyone--sure, this would be pretty cool, until the big 3 go out of business and the economy crashes down behind it. This might not (probably not?) happen, but it's worth thinking about--even if you're Canadian.
I'm sure the original poster, despite being _such_ a _typical_ ignorant American, is aware that the US subsidizes private industry. I just think the original poster was just exploring an idea--you don't have to get all offensive and anti-American about it.
> ..it costs.
Well...it's that kind of an attitude that helps to put good companies out of business (Easel readily comes to mind.) I *bought* Ximian Desktop Professional in order to SUPPORT Ximian in their efforts at providing Open Source to the community. I didn't have to. In fact, I was already using it before I purchased it.
Since the company I work for uses Exchange (puke) I also bought the Exchange Connector, two licenses in fact, so I wouldn't be forced to use Outlook. I don't care that the Connector is closed source. What I care about is having the ability to use Linux in a Windows-dominated environment and having seemless integration without pestering IT about it (IMAP/SMTP does not give the full range of Exchange/Outlook functionality.)
I also care about providing financial support to a company that gives a LOT back to the community (Ximian GNOME, Mono, Evolution as well as their work with OpenOffice and their evangelicism.)
But that's just my opinion.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
I'm sorry to see that so many /.ers can't see the economic reasons for keeping government out of private markets whenever possible. I'm not saying the German government is any worse than say, the American or Canadian government. I'm pointing out that in this one case, you've got a nation-state building something it plans to distribute freely that will compete with products that private market workers and investors are making a living from.
Read one of Friedman's speeches on market distortions for a good view of this.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
If it wasn't for governments subsidizing software development, we wouldn't have the internet, the web, HTML, MP3, JPG, MPEG...
All of these things came from government funded projects. I know that many people find it hard to believe, or don't want to believe it, but it is actually government funded projects which drives most of the innovation in the software industry, not Microsoft, Oracle, etc. This is why I believe all the recent government interest in Linux and Open Source is really the death knell for most "off-the-shelf" software.
Perhaps the German Government should allocate just a wee bit more time for the development of a FULL Groupware Suite?!?!?!?
"How long does it take to make a FULL Groupware suite" is a question like "How long is a piece of string?" It depends on what you mean by a "FULL Groupware Suite".
If they were going to try to reproduce the functional equivalent Lotus Notes in four months, I'd say they were smoking crack. But Exchange? Exchange has always struck me as a triumph of MS obfuscation. It isn't really much of a groupware platform, for most people it's just an MTA, MDA and calendar server.
As far as I can see, the problem isn't that there aren't open source implementations of all these functions. If any thing, there are too many (if there can be such a thing). Each of the pieces needed for 99% of what people do with Exchange has been done in open source -- multiple times. It even seems to me like there have been plenty of groups trying to use these to get an exchange replacement off the ground, with various levels of completion. The problem is nobody has got to critical mass.
It seems to me that a large user paying somebody to integrate the pieces is a good way to move the ball forward. Given the software that is already freely licensed that solves most of the problem, could an adequately funded team of experienced software developers pull together mail transfer, mail delivery, calendar and user agent in three months? I don't see why not.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This book was reviewed here.
*
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
If they can pull this off, it will be an impressive success for the open source model. For a set of contractors to go from getting the problem description to a complete implementation in 3 1/2 months, due to the existence of a good set of tools, would really show the strength of the model.
Getting a custom installation generally takes far longer than that. If this project works, it will start to look reasonable for companies who are planning to get a proprietary solution to get an open source one at the same time to use until the proprietary one is ready.
I've had long contact with Groupware systems (have installed and run Exchange & Groupwise systems for several years), and I'm always amazed at why someone hasn't managed to take the IMAP standard and extend it so that it's simpler to interface with more vanilla clients or lower-end clients.
Basically even the "full" client would talk IMAP to the server and then render the data to whatever GUI calendaring/scheduling stuff it would want. The advantage is that vanilla text IMAP clients could still enumerate a folder and read non-mail data as messages, and perhaps even send mail messages that could be interpreted by the server as non-mail items (appointment, tasks, etc).
Exchange's IMAP functionality kind of does this, but calendar items don't show up as anything more than URLs to the Exchange web client.
>>The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.
>Isn't this how we got into this mess in the first place? The OS needs, IE, which you can't remove, and Outlook requires IE, and everything is integrated into these two applications and their support subsystem. Look at the trouble it's given the Windows users.
True enough, but is that arguement supposed to support the KDE alternative approach? That comment applies equally to KDE, does it not?
Just TRY decoupling Konqueror from KDE... you can't even (EASILY) build KDE without all the theme stuff.
Personally, I think 70% of this is backend, desktop/OS-agnostic stuff... and should be worked out in a desktop-neutral manner. I'm not saying everything would be built with KDE dependencies, but it would not surprise me either.
We really need some cooperation and coordination between KDE & GNOME... I'm not putting forth the "one desktop" concept, but surely we can get cooperation on things like calendaring. If GNOME has a calendaring concept (Ximian's commercial Exchange plugin doesn't count), then all the open source folks should leverage what they have in common.
iCal isn't open source, and since it runs on OS X it won't help people trying to migrate to Linux. (Personally, I think migrating from Windows to Mac is more realistic in the short term than Windows to Linux, but that's just my opinion.)
It is honestly the only thing left stopping my organization from being completely open source. I have a feeling it is the same for many other small businesses.
...and unfair moderation. How does this rate a Troll?
To address the poster's legit question, the German govt is doing this exactly because they have no dog in this race and the players are US-based companies.
Think about how Airbus got its start, how it continues to be propped up by European govts, and how we're responding by propping up our own airline industry. I wonder if the US govt will respond to this threat to US software dominance in some protectionist way.
No sense in arguing the moderation of my original post. This crowd can't see past their Open Source fanaticism to hold a fair minded discusion on economics. And I'm a big supporter of Linux and the like. I was just pointing out that government subsidy of open source software can have distortions in private markets.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Actually Cologne is the English spelling of the German city Köln. So it already has a K :-)
-Spyky
Wrong..
You CAN build Konqueror out of KDE - there's a special version of Konqueror which doesn't even requires X! it's called KDENOX (KDE NO X)..
As for themes - you can do it also. You just need to remove the directories of the themes before you start compiling KDE.
Hetz (Heunique)
Just today I was talking about how Linux really needs this sort of thing (well, that and a decent network filesystem; NFS is vile and AFS is ... idiosyncratic. Coda is apparently not particularly suited to real world needs and Intermezzo is something completely different)
The LDAP integration is actually something they could really lever here, KDE could seriously do with a graphical LDAP admin system (ie one specifically designed for managing users in particular). That and they would do well to stick Kerberos up every concieveable orifice too - Single Sign On is a good thing, and I dont mean one controlled by a company with the letters M and S in its name.
I don't think you understand the level of integration and object reuse in KDE. If you are technically inclined, you should look at the code sometime. The programs are different, it's true, but they are to become one client with the functionality of the (currently) separate programs.
Before you spout bile, you should see what the current software has to offer, and then use your imagination a bit.
I bet they will, the tools are there as you said. Can you imagine 1993 for GNU/Linux ?
- OpenOffice 1.* / StarOffice 6.*
- Mozilla 1.* / Netscape 7.*
- Stable GCC/C++ ABI for a long time (we hope
:-)
- Stable KDE API for a long time (3.*)
- Stable GNOME API for a long time (2.*)
- Groupware solution (kroupware)
- Apache and the usual server stuff
- Lots of commercial software already ported (Kylix, Oracle, Games, etc)
I think the time for maturity of GNU/Linux as a whole (embedded, desktop, workstation, low-end server, high-end server) has come. There is only one main thing remaining: an office (XML) file-format standard for all free software office suites, please !. This is the next big step IMHO. Filters are holding Office suite projects behind. A common standard would make infinetly easier to everybody. There is a kickstart here but there is no much activity yet it seems. Please go and help if you can !This is not a mere subsidy, though. This is a contract to build software which meets needs that have not previously been met.
They aren't subsidising open source; they're paying for a service which (for some reason) they believe that they need.
Now, you can argue that they shouldn't have the money available to pay for it (you'd be arguing for smaller government), or you can argue that they don't really need the features that Outlook doesn't provide, but you can't call this mere economic distortion. It's no more distortion than any consumer distorts the market by installing Linux.
-Billy
iCal isn't open source, but it does all its communications using standard protocols, so it's the next best thing. In theory it would be very easy to integrate iCal with a (yet to be built AFAIK) open source server. Just thought it was worth noticing.
tankengine
has ordered
contractors
functional equivalence
Now, sequencing them and adding a single apostrophe, you get:
tankengine has ordered contractor's functional equivalence
I think this entire story is a front for hiding secret messages in the link texts themselves. So we may want to start poking through other Slashdot stories and look for other secret messages.
(Note: Yes, this is a joke.) ;o)
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
Many posters have argued that government intervention into private software markets is bad, and that Europeans are foolish not to see how bad this really is
We already have government intervention into US-produced software. Europeans know full well about this, and are wise to push open source solutions.
Having another country's government spy on your citizens IS a proper concern of one's own government.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Terrific? For Microsoft maybe...
Terrific \Ter*rif"ic\, a. [L. terrificus; fr. terrere to frighten + facere to make. See {Terror}, and {Fact}.]
Causing terror; adapted to excite great fear or dread;
terrible; as, a terrific form; a terrific sight.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It's the duty of any government to spend its citizens' money thoughtfully.
Agreed. In fact, this is a perfect example of the free market working as it should. What has happened is that one of the major customers of groupware products has realised that it is now cheaper to contract out for their own solution than to buy in from external suppliers, and so this is what they are doing. This is in large part due to the wealth of excellent free software available to base such a home-grown solution on, but also due to the high prices and excessive restrictions on existing groupware products.
Put simply, the incumbent suppliers have not reacted to changes in the market and have priced themselves out. If Exchange, for instance, was $100 for an unlimited user licence, then I suspect this Kroupware project would never have got off the drawing board - it simply wouldn't be economically sensible. Unfortunately, the current vendors' greed has blinded them to the needs of their customers, and they will suffer in the longer-term for it.
The fact that the Kroupware project will itself all be free software matters not one jot, at least not from the perspective of the free market, all it is is a new competitor, and from the point of view of the consumer, one that has a number of very attractive attributes that existing solutons cannot match. But that's just how it works: if, as a vendor, you price your products too high, or your products are sub-optimal or place too many restrictions on the user, then you are going to get competition and often you will have a hard time matching your new competition. That's just tough luck. If you cannot compete on price due to your competitor having lower costs that you cannot reduce, then you will have to make your product attractive in other ways.
This is precisely how the free market economy is supposed to work. It doesn't matter that the project was instigated by a government, all they are is one of, if not the largest customer of such products, so they have the most to gain from reducing their costs, and are probably one of the least risk-averse - it doesn't matter to them if the project succeeds or fails, they will survive either way without really batting an eyelid.
Free market advocates who try to write governments out of the economic script have it precisely backwards - in any country government is one of the most important players in the economy, certainly one of the biggest consumers, and you cannot just ignore that. Consider them as the largest non-profit organization, in effect a charity dedicated to the advancement of the country as a whole, and you have a better idea of who they are and how they are important economically.
It would, in reality, be no different if a large ordinary non-profit had commisioned the Kroupware project for economic reasons, but I bet people wouldn't complain about that.
An open source replacement for Exchange's calendar store could eliminate a lot of Windows Server installations. Thousands of businesses are tied to Windows Server because Exchange works exclusively with Windows Server and Outlook works (almost) exclusively with Exchange.
Exchange calendaring replacements have been developed by HP and Steltor, and acquired by Samsung and Oracle, respectively. Those products generally don't integrate with Outlook's calendar as well as Exchange does, but they prove the viability of the Exchange-replacement market, and an open source product would have a big pricing advantage over those commercial alternatives.
The tough part is persuading the end-users to switch from Outlook to a new calendar client. If IT can do this, the odds are good that IT could convince the users to switch from Microsoft Office to Star Office.
Maybe it's premature to short-sell MSFT, but this initiative could be a crack in the wall.
Ah.... no, I don't think you quite got what he meant.
Without the Exchange Connector he would lose functionality with Ximian because IMAP/SMTP can't replicate what Exchange/Outlook do. With the Exchange Connector he regains that functionality. This isn't a limitation of Ximian's client as it is the data from Exchange - and there's a "fix" but it's proprietary and costs money. Can't exactly blame Ximian for getting payback on the really deeply mystic stuff.
Matter of fact there are backend servers out there, even free ones, that can replace Exchange. But it requires you to buy additional software for Outlook clients and it still isn't as integrated as Exchange/Outlook is -- but it's 98% there and about half the cost or less. This isn't too surprising, since you'd expect vendor software to work best with software from the same vendor.
You can, in fact, have your cake and eat it too, but right now there will still be crumbs here and there. Which, of course, is what this German Groupware order is all about.
Likewise, some people don't fully understand the GPL. They think that if someone is selling GPL'd software, then they must give the source code away to everyone for free. Really, all GPL requires the seller to do is provide a copy of source code to their customers. Sure, the customer can then turn around and give that source code away to anyone for free, but the seller is under no obligation to do so, because they're only providing software to the buyer. The GPL is not about giving away all your rights as a software manufacturer or retailer, it's about preserving the rights of the buyer.
If the German government is the sole customer of the Kroupware program, then the developers of that program are under no obligation to put up an anonymous access FTP site and say, "Free Downloads for Everyone!" They are only obligated to provide the source code to their buyer. The German government could then distribute it for free to all German citizens, but the citizens could then likewise distribute it for free to the rest of the world. The GPL is not about restricting rights; it's about preserving them.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Is it not possible for a product to have both useful features, not found in another product, and horrible flaws, also not found in another product? Whether the flaws outweigh the features is generally context-dependent.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And I quote from the first link:
... We will therefore create our own branch called kroupware_branch in the modules kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and kdepim. We aim to retrofit the changes on this branch as timely as possible back into the HEAD branch; this will happen in close collaboration with the maintainers of the affected projects, and following the KDE release cycle. ..."
"
All the development they do will be integrated into the main KDE branches after the fact, since they have to fast track this project.
The intend to integrate all the development they do into KDE eventually - not the contracting company, but they obviously will make their code available to the KDE open source developers (probably everyone).
Actually, I was thinking of 'croup', which is a nasty little cough kids get from hanging out with other kids.
My thoughts exactly. That name does not leave a terribly pleasant impression with me.
The concept is good though. The lack of a good Exchange/Outlook alternative has been a strike against *nix in many MS-centric offices.
>Wrong..
>You CAN build Konqueror out of KDE - there's a special version of Konqueror which doesn't even requires X! it's called KDENOX (KDE NO X)..
"special version" supports my point... one cannot take the basic package, and easily decouple the fluffy bits.
One can come up with (and there are) "special versions" of Mozilla also. It doesn't change the meaning of the arguement.
The government investing in order to move technology along and/or to protect consumer rights is a fine thing. But it is not without the risk that competition will be harmed, which I take to be the significance (intended or not) of DP's post. I think it is correct to point out that a government entering the marketplace can hurt competition, just as it is valid to point out that a government leaving a marketplace to its own forces can leave corruption and self-interest unchecked.
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Nobody seems to have to have noticed that one of the companies doing this was already completed the integration of gpg into KMail. This was another project paid for by the German government. It was a just rolled into kmail for KDE 3.1, and by all accounts works excellently.
They also provided support for mutt.
If the german government continues to provide backing like this, then we can expect great things from the KDE project in the future.
Would anyone besides me argue that they should be using Qmail and Courier-IMAP instead? They seem to be the superior solutions.
There is nothing about KDE that prevents KDE apps from running under GNOME, or vice versa, as long as all the dependencies are satisfied.
The whole thing is being done in KDE, hosted on KDE CVS, using KDE apps as the base, so I would say that, yes, everything would be built with KDE dependencies. So what? As I said above, that doesn't mean you have to use KDE, just that you have to have the necessary components and libs installed. I run several KDE apps under WindowMaker every day, no problem, so even if the project is heavily KDE dependent I would say it's still desktop-agnostic since you don't need to be using KDE to use any of the KDE apps.
As for OS-agnostic, I can't say. I know QT is available for Windows, but I have no idea what that means as far as running KDE apps on Windows. That's one area where a Mozilla-based solution could have a definate advantage. Mozilla runs everywhere. This particular project plans on using Outlook with an existing plug-in, though.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Although it could be debated that in some cases the government compteting with industry can be a unfair thing, in this case you have to consider the behavior of the competition (MS). Microsoft has consistenly used unfair tactics to compete, and as a result, largely nobody has been able to compete, even giving things away for free.
In this case, the government may not be trying to destroy an industry, they may just be sick and tired of paying monopoly rates, and seeing that there does not seem to be any other way to generate the competition necessary to bring those monopoly rate down by having a competitive market.
The government probably wouldn't do this with cars because there is no need to, the car market is already competitive.
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
That would seem to be a problem for vendors, not users. If Debian can make installing the maze of dependencies that is gnucash as easy as "apt-get install gnucash", then they can probably handle some groupware suite as well.
Now, it's true that DIYers may have some extra headaches. But, quite frankly, people who say, "I want to do it the hard way, 'cause it's more fun," and then turn around and whine, "this way's too hard!" don't get much sympathy from me.
(And before you start moaning about those poor Debian/RH/Suse folks who have no choice but to wrestle with these dependencies, note that it's a Debian developer saying these things. We revel in the challenge.)
think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel [citadel.org] project [...]
Well, good, competition is always good, even with free software. I'd like to wish both projects the best of luck, and hope that neither one falters in their goal to bring us high-quality groupware software.
Right now we have a situation where a single company has their thumb on the on/off switch to innovation. They have the source code to the operating system that is run on nearly every computer in the world.
No application development company can compete against such odds. By controlling the foundation upon which all other applications run, Microsoft has a plethora of unethical weapons to kill competition at its disposal. Further, Microsoft has shown no restraint in using these unethical and outright illegal tactics.
It is time to remove the gun that is pointed at the head of developers everywhere. The platform of choice to develop applications for all people should have its source open. All developer's should be able to develop for a platform where the can be sure that there are no undocumented APIs and where no single company can "tweak" the platform to cause artificial incompatibilities designed to kill competition!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I have seen a serioius deterioration in the speed of my own code when I switched from developeing on a 250mhz Irix to a dual-processor 1.5Ghz Linux box (in both cases the software was being targeted to both those machines and NT as well). Going back to the Irix for testing and some stuff is suddenly painfully slow. Trying the old version of the program proves that it was much better, it is not just that I am used to the Linux machine's speed.
Conversely though I had to switch to the Linux box, as it matches what most people here are using and I was wasting too much time making the OpenGL efficient for the Irix rather than Linux. Also the Irix c++ compiler has problems with namespaces and stl. And of course compiling is way faster on the Linux box.
The government defines the software markets by introducing the concept of copyright. Without that, the dollar value of any particular copy of a piece of software would be almost zero.
How can a government possibly "distort" something that is its own creation? There is no "natural" state of a software market independent from government control.
I hope in their OpenLDAP setup and their configuration tools they provide for integration with Samba, nss_ldap, and pam_ldap. That would reduce a lot of headaches for me. I'm one of those masochistic admins who accepted a project to do what the German Govt. proposes (minus the calendaring). We are currently using OpenLDAP for mail routing, Samba authentication, e-mail group/mailing list address expansion, and Cyrus IMAP/POP authentication. As someone suggested, installation and upgrades can be a pain in the ass. It sure will be nice to have all the server components tested and distributed together as a set.
include $sig;
1;
Even if it is, who cares? Is Microsoft (the chief competitor to this groupware product) in any position to complain about unfair competition?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
internet (web), yes HTML no, subset of SGML a non government research product MP3, nope fraunhoffer AG non-government contract JPG, nope Joint Motion Picture Expert Group an industry trade group MPEG, see above.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yes, I suppose that I sort of makes sense. Still, all things considered Gnome really has got the jump when it comes to applications. Especially when you consider that Sun and the folks working on OpenOffice.org are closely allied with Gnome. KDE has the better desktop environment, but Gnome isn't too shabby, and it has better applications (including Evolution).
I don't think that it matters much though, whatever backend software that gets written will be available to Evolution as well. That's the beauty of open protocols.
This is wonderful news for the world of Free Software.
I find it rather surprising to see comments with regard to "state subsidies" and "distortion of the marketplace". After all, the German government simply is *buying* software from a commercial vendor and it does so under terms that encourages competition to such an extent that any other commercial vendor can enter the same marketplace and try to place its own products.
As a German taxpayer I am very much in favor of the advantages this recent development has and will have:
- Microsofts monopoly on PC-based groupware
solutions will finally meet tough competition
- Users can now freely decide on the OS of their
choice
- the buyer has the opportunity to ensure safe
communication within its organization due to
the nature of an Open Source solution.
- bugfixes and enhancements will be available at
no extra charge and a lot quicker than before
- Complete control over features and security
layout of the software
Apart from the fact that Microsoft's Outlook, Outlook Express and Exchange are about the suckiest software products available (As a usenet regular I am *really* fed up with seeing all these malformated postings produced by OE-users).
What's the downside? Less money to be be thrown at Microsoft. And I can't see anything wrong with that. How many times have you heard people whine about Outlook and Exchange being the only available products? I have heard that one over and over again and I hope that this complaint is a thing of the past and makes people switch over to an Open Source solution.
Considering the fact that Germany's budget is in a desastrous state I find it favorable to see my money spent in developping new, free software instead of spending millions of bucks for products under a restrictive license and a company that couldn't care less about customer satisfaction.
I'm not sure, if the tender documents stated "we want a groupware sollution for linux running kde" or just "we want an open source groupware sollution", but I'm guessing it's the latter.
It just seems to me, like you're tying yourself into a different OS platform (at least at first), and then also into a specific WM.
It's too late (and it would be stupid) to change the platform specifications for the project, but since they plan not only to publish all their design documents as well as source code, "you" could implement in on another software platform.
Personally I'm a java developer (who happens to program as well), so obviously that's what I'm thinking, as it will not be nesscesary to port any applications to another OS, if you don't want to use Linux for whatever reasons - all you'd need is a runtime environment (NOT MS'!!!) and you'd be set to go. With "a bit" of fiddeling you could also make a midlet application for your mobile appliances like cell phones and pdas.
The biggest problem in making it in java, as I see it, is that while the kroupware developers have (wisely) chosen to tie a bunch of existing applications together and add some functionality, there's not really a way to do that in java, as there aren't any applications for that.
BUT - wouldn't this be a "perfect" application to prove javas usefullness - both on the server side (Exchange replacement) but also on the client side (Outlook replacement)?
Personally I've chosen to stay away from OSS projects for one very important reason - almost no one is interested in actually developing and designing the programs - they just want to get down to the programming, and to me that's just plain stupid. You can do that with small programs, just like you can build a shed without any kind of blueprint, but when was the last time you built a sky scraper without a blueprint?
I guess what I'm saying is, that if some of you people out there, are interested in actually _developing_ this kind of program for java, I'd be willing to help with the project. Hell - I'd even be willing to be in charge of it - as long as the team is made up of DESIGNERS.
Anyway - any takers?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The design document makes no mention of CAP. The method for doing calendaring that is described is by using IMAP Calendar folders and posting client generated Free/Busy schedules to an FTP server, a la JiCal
The problem with this is that there is no way to schedule resources and the calendaring is still asynchronous. Scheduling resources and real-time free-busy information are two main reasons people choose Exchange or Notes over other solutions.
These guys should team up with the libical developers that are doing a calendar server. Evolution and Mozilla should both be able to plug in to that.
It seems the main reason that they are doing things this way is that Bynari's plugin will work with this schema. Quite frankly, I don't see what server development they are doing beyond a possible administration tool and documenting the configuration of existing products.
It looks like most of the development will be going into the client.
Here's to waiting for a real open source calendaring solution.
Sorry to be playing the 'Stark Fist of Reality' today, I got real excited till I read the design doc.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Every so often a new idea or technology destroys an industry and the luddites. The printing press, the cotton gin, steam engine, and open source. It frees up hands and mind to work on the next level of civilization.
The paper you cited even goes so far as to refer to GNU/Linux. Chances are good that folks using the term GNU/Linux are going to use the FSF's definition of "Free Software."
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It almost makes you cry, doesn't it? We started 175 years before them and they're ahead of us.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
To answer your points:
1) Innovation only increases the cost of product for a limited period of time after the innovation. Once that period is over, market forces will bring selling prices back in line with production costs.
2) Monopolies are illegal, exactly because monopolies lead to prices that don't reflect production costs. Competition leads to lowering of production costs, which leads to lower prices.
3) Cartel's are also illegal.
4) Advertising can be looked as an increasing in production costs. It allows for some level of increase in price, but doesn't allow it to stay at levels vastly in excess of production costs.
Now, if you take a look at the actual market place, you'll see that this is generally true. Most products do not sell that far in excess of production costs. Cars, industrial machines, and even computers, at the large scale, have very low profit margins. Computer manufacturers, for example, make only a few percent profit per machine. Now, software on the other hand, has huge profit margins. Why? Because people don't understand it, and because its new. Once the novelty of software wears off, and it becomes commodity (and people figure out that software monopolies like Microsoft are just as bad as any steel or oil monopoly ever was) the cost of software will decrease to the point where it is somewhat in line with production costs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Apache is open source. Calendar sharing is simple to set up using apache and mod_dav. Instructions here.
The company I work for still uses (mostly and at least in Europe) HP's OpenMail. They did, however, hack it in some way that only Outlook can connect. I'd guess that servers are configured to allow only MAPI connections (before it was possible to connect using any IMAP client).
I was, therefore, curious whether the Connector could work in such situation? I'd assume this unlikely, as servers are not real exchange...
--AP
internet (web), yes HTML no, subset of SGML a non government research product MP3, nope fraunhoffer AG non-government contract JPG, nope Joint Motion Picture Expert Group an industry trade group MPEG, see above
This is all wrong. SGML was a standard formulated by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and it's main adopters were the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the US Department of Defense.
HTML and the Web came out of CERN, a project in Switzerland funded by the governments of many nations.
Development of MP3 was principally in Germany at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen funded by the European Union.
JPEG is a standards group, made up of representatives of national standards bodies in a variety of countries and academic and industry groups. Ditto MPEG.
Yes of course companies would have networked their computers without government help. But it would have taken many more years to have the kind of open standards that have made the web so successful because it is not in the interests of private companies to create standards from which they do not financially profit.
nternet (web), yes HTML no, subset of SGML a non government research product MP3, nope fraunhoffer AG non-government contract JPG, nope Joint Motion Picture Expert Group an industry trade group MPEG, see above.
This is all wrong. SGML was a standard formulated by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and it's main adopters were the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the US Department of Defense.
HTML and the Web came out of CERN, a project in Switzerland funded by the governments of many nations.
Development of MP3 was principally in Germany at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen funded by the European Union.
JPEG is a standards group, made up of representatives of national standards bodies in a variety of countries and academic and industry groups. Ditto MPEG.
Yes of course companies would have networked their computers without government help. But it would have taken many more years to have the kind of open standards that have made the web so successful because it is not in the interests of private companies to create standards from which they do not financially profit.