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Aethera 1.0
gatch writes "theKompany.com released version 1.0 of their cross-platform PIM suite Aethera. KOrganizer is included as a calendar and todo list component. Check out these screenshots. According to Shawn Gordon, theKompany president, 'Actually we are about 2 weeks away from having Aethera work with Kolab [groupware server] - at least that is our sense of it at the moment.' Interesting discussion at KDE.news."
because the Open Source movement has never, EVER been about innovation.
It has always been about "Hrm, nice, but buggy and expensive. Lets copy it, and make it better..."
GNU, Linux, KDE, etc. All copies of another system. Hell, even BSD UNIX is a cloned version of ATT UNIX.
..this is looking like a viable alternative to evolution, which aside from raising the level of development for this sort of software, should be beneficial to the desktop linux market; having a viable alternative to outlook is one thing, but having a community in which more than one are being actively developed to compete or provide more choice for companies migrating to different operating systems is excellent. :)
The interface certainly doesn't look as pretty as evolution (although it's hard to tell; after 5 posts, the server is treacley already), but I'm not really into KDE interfaces. *shrug*.. it'll be interesting to see how much of a userbase it builds..
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
...excellent, I hope it's buggy so I can migrate from Outlook easily.
That's so Kool dude. Let's Klap our hands in Komplete celebration.
"Sufferin' succotash."
That's a very naive assessment of the Open Source community. The goal of Open Source has always been to create high-quality software and distribute it for Free As In Speech. Compare this to closed-source crapware like Micro$oft Outhouse, which is driven by marketing alone. Micro$oft creates new versions of their closed-source crapware every year, expects people to pay $300 to upgrade, and forces the upgrade by breaking backward compatibility.
Open-source file formats, on the other hand, never change. I can take a LaTeX file from 1989 and create a beautiful PostScript file using Free As In Speech software. Try doing that with Micro$oft "software."
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
I think I'm lost in the world of IT about what PIM, groupware and all that actually do, what applications they got in this world (both in professional and personal use) and how these technologies improve our current situation?
Hate me!
" because the Open Source movement has never, EVER been about innovation"
Don't be such a stupid Troll. At some point everything is built upon something which came before it. Your examples are like looking at a Porsche and saying "Yep no innovation there", its just a copy of a Model T.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
So why don't people apply the same insight to Microsoft? There's got to be a thousand people who say that "Microsoft doesn't innovate - every single one of their products was based on .
I think the parent has a point. Open Source has to be held to exactly the same standard as everybody else.
Could someone in the know explain to me the advantages this have over Kontact, the KDE PIM solution? Since it is already using KAddressbook and KOrganizer, that juts leaves ToDo and email.... KMail is already a highly capable email client, I doubt they could improve on that much?
Doesn't look like it integrates with Palm OS devices, as Evolution does (and some other KDE PIM apps).
... shame I'm not one of them. It's nice to hear than we've got another competitor to Outlook and Novell Ximian Evolution that will keep development nice and fresh.
On a related note, where did this K-ism thing come from? It really bugs me, quite honestly. I presume it's from the original "Cool" = "Kool" thing, but considering that the K in KDE no longer stands for Kool it seems to me that it's getting rather tiresome!
You are neglecting the fact that AT&T UNIX was at one time open source. That's how Berkeley got ahold of the code in the first place.It was even free as in beer.
BSD UNIX is not a clone of AT&T UNIX. Through the efforts of Bill Joy and others BSD evolved directly from it.In an open manner. And they gave it away.
That's why AT&T sued BSDI for selling it. . . and lost, because the code was already open source.
KFG
Until they can build in compatibility with Microsoft vulnerabilities, you are welcome to use the Linux virus. It works on the honor system:
The server is slow and may be totally slashdotted soon, so here is a torrent I made which contains all the 11 screenshots in .png format. Please use this instead of the main webserver. (Read about BitTorrent if you're not familiar with it.)
"I don't recall ever having to install "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATES" for Mozilla because of some worm going around." Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
Access sucks. So spake the wise Seth. Why? Please grace us with your obviously paramount knowledge of everything software related. And what, pray tell, is the Open Source alternative? Text files indexed through a bunch of perl scripts outputting LaTEX? Sure.
But you go on, saying Honestly, LaTeX has been superior to that piece of closed-source crapware for 15 years. It appears to me that, frankly, you have no clue what Word is since you insist on comparing it to Latex.
Finally, please grow up and stop writing "Micro$oft". It is idiotic. Trust me on that.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
We have the set of standard KDE apps: KMail, Korganizer, KAddressBook and so on, we have Kroupware project that produced Kolab Server and Kolab Client, we have Kontact (which according to its FAQ is supposed to replace Kolab Client) and now we have Aethera.
At my company I'm lobbying for approving a Linux/KDE-based workstation an an alternative for MS Windows-based setup. However, the requires picking up and recommending a single, unified PIM solution that would be used by employees with Linux/KDE setups. With all those competing solutions appearing one by one it's starting to be quite a difficult task.
Worked fine for me, I'm running a nightly though!
Is it that they are transparent with no background texture and therefore hard to read? The problem is you didn't wait for the menu background image to load, it took >1 minute for me, probably because they're being slashdotted.
I am NaN
This is normal in the open source community and actually fairly healthy. What happens is that the community in general sees a need and then you'll have several solid solutions developed in response.
For example, 4 years ago Linux wasn't "Enterprise" enough because it didn't have a journaling filesystem. Today we have several: ext3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs and probably others.
Before that we needed a decent GUI toolset to replace Motif(which was commercial-only). Several sprung up and today we have 2 really solid and widely used ones, GTK and QT.
So while it's confusing today to have so many choices, typically a couple will dominate the "market" once everything settles down.
On the other hand, PIMs can be really useful. I'm back to being a plain old engineer, but I still like to keep my address book and calendar in my Palm Vx and sync it up with the corresponding software on the desktop. That way if I'm at a meeting I can look at the Palm to see what's next on the schedule, and if I'm somewhere else (e.g. a doctor's appointment) I can check to see what days are free for my 6-month checkup visit. :-) Some people also sync their email onto Palms or Blackberries or whatever, but I've never seen the point. I'm happy to get away from it for a while.
Getting all of this to work on Windows is pretty easy. You can install Palm Desktop and sync the thing to that, or you can just install HotSync and then use "conduits" that sync up the Mozilla address book, Notes, and lots of other tools.
On Linux, you can use KPilot and KOrganizer. I got them set up on the Linux box at my new job a few days ago, and they seem to work ok. The (big) catch is that I don't really want to store my info in KOrganizer. I want the addresses to go into Mozilla and the calendar entries to go into the weird "Corporate Time" system our group uses at work. Unfortunately there's no CorporateTime conduit for Linux (only Linux and Mac), and I haven't been able to make the Mozilla one work on Linux yet either.
Summary: Linux is getting pretty good in the PIM/groupware department, but it has a little ways to go to catch up to Windows.
AT&T Unix was never open source.
It was distributed to universities under a research license.
The lawsuit issue is more complex, because it was never discussed in court, instead USL and Berkeley settled the case.
Berkeley agreed to remove all the files that still contained ATT code. That used to be called "4.4 BSD Lite" which could not boot, as opposed to "4.4BSD Encumbered" which was a complete implementation.
The free BSD distros of today derive from BSD Lite 4.4
The screenshots look ugly! WinXP'ish icons, no anti-aliasing, and the colors........now, at least people migrating from Win3.1 will feel right at home.
Thanks, you may mod me down now.
Yeah, I found it kind of strange that theKompany's web site doesn't make Aethera's license entirely clear. On the other hand, when you click on a download link and get sent to Sourceforge without having to buy it, it becomes pretty obvious that it's at least free-as-in-beer.
And if you download and untar the source code (as I did, because I was curious about this as well), you'll see from the COPYING and COPYING.GPL files that it's apparently licensed under the GPL.
Yay.
One thing I like about evolution is that when you are setting up your filters you can filter on pretty much anything you want, including specific headers. This helps for using things like popfile or spambayes filters which use their own specific headers. Aethera only lets you filter on the plain old stuff (subject, body, to, from, etc - no specific headers). Modifying subject lines is so ugly. But other than that, I like how it operates. And importing from other mailboxes, calendar files, etc. seems to work quite well!
GnomeSkull
http://jdouglasmedia.com/