Slashdot Mirror
Novell to port Evolution to Windows
Gladiat0r writes "Nat Friedman blogged on Planet Gnome today that Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist (of Gimp for Windows fame) to help Fredrik Hedberg port Beagle to Windows, and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows."
Finally, a real client will be available for OSS calendaring. Granted, Sunbird is giving it a go, but I think that this will be warm and fuzzy for corporate users. This is a Good Thing!
Sure, take all the nice Linux applications over to Windows...don't worry about porting the nice Windows apps over to Linux though. Nope, we're fine...We'll just run them at half speed with WINE or something...
If this encourages companies to move away from Microsoft's office organiser software, it could make it easier for them to migrate to Linux. Interesting.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Tor did a lot of work on porting gtk and gimp to windows and because of that, today gimp works as good or at least almost as good as it does in unix, and is a great competitor to photoshop.
Seems that his work payed off for him. Congrats Tor, and keep up the good work.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
There goes the last hurdle in your IT budget for Windows boxes. Now there's no reason to buy Office! I'll gladly pay say..a $100 for a nice port of Evolution per box. Save me all sorts of money.
This guy is way out there
I mean let's bring all the greatest OS-programs to the Windows platform. Just what Microsoft needs to strengthen it's monopoly: even more great applications on Windows. Of course many people will get in touch with Firefox and now Evo but they won't make the switch to a free platform. But still, I'd love to get my desktop users off of Outlook and this might be a real alternative for them.
I am just not sure if OpenSource should battle Microsoft on their own ground. They can change the rules anytime they like. And they have done so before...
This is great news for GTK+ on Win32, which has always suffered speed and look-and-feel problems on the win32 platform. When a big application like Evolution gets ported from one platform to another, the base libraries such as libgtk, pango, and the like can only benefit. I look forward to the speed improvements and bug fixes in the win32 versions of gtk. This should really bolster the cross-platform nature of gtk.
One of the strongest reasons Microsoft is putting in the table when comparing Office vs Open source alternatives is the availability of Outlook. We've Openoffice, we've firefox, we've thunderbird, but we didn't have a Outlook alternative.
That was certainly stopping many people from switching to Openoffice. With Evolution ported to windows, it's no longer the case, and having the exchange connector even more. Nice news.
- Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.
- OpenOffice.org instead of Office
- Evolution instead of Outlook
When Windows users can easily move w/o doing any "scary" OS change and try out open source applications "risk free", they'll be more likely to try.The last, most significant jump will be made smaller and easier, after new users become comfortable with that suite of applications.
Namely, Linux instead of Windows.
Which is down where an OS should be; a standard commodity, interchangeable, free, stable and not full of Innovations® like HTML renderers, special codec media players.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If people use Windows apps at work, and can't use them back at home on their Linux boxes, they will just stick with Windows.
If people can use the same apps at work and at home on Windows and on Linux, full migration can be done.
Cheers,
Adolfo
I'm pretty sure Novell has more than one programmer. I could see hiring a Windows person to port the UI while still having someone else work on the backend.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
(Your probably gonna mod this as flamebait for me saying this) Make no mistake about it, cross platform applications are good for the open source movement. They spread awareness of how good Open Source can be, and give people a viable free (as in beer, as in choice) alternative. However, people crying about how certain applications should only stay on "certain" operating systems are hypocrites. This is supposed to be about freedom of choice, right? This isn't supposed to be about the freedom to only work on a "particular, politically correct, operating system."
Requiem
this is great news - this will help the migrations later when users finally get sick of paying microsoft for viruses and spyware.
Perhaps that'll attract more users?
Beagle is written in C#, and mono supports windows. Can't be that difficult to port to windows.
Sunbird is a personal calendar. It doesn't support or have goals of being an Outlook Calendar replacement.
For one thing sunbird's events are events they aren't tied to users, etc.
It works great for a single person or a small group of people (i use it!) but it would never work well in a situation where events need to be tied to a user.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Evolution is the Linux desktop killer app. It really is. I know this is slashdot, and here anything "K" is King, but KMail is a bad joke when you try to use it beyond simple POP3 collection SMTP sending. Evolution becomes ever more impressive with each release -- and the 2.0 series is a beauty.
Windows users would be extremely lucky to get Evolution... and I'll bet that many of them would find it one more reason not to stay with the expensive, buggy, security nightmare of Windows and Outlook.
Everybody keeps saying "great, now all my users can move off Outlook". One reason why I personally haven't moved my entire desktop over to Linux is that I can't easily and reliably move all my years' worth of Outlook email, calendar, task, and notes data into Evolution.
So a port of the app is nice, but we also need de-mensa'd data migration tools.