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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."
This write-up is pretty short. Maybe a sentence about Evolution would be nice.. or at least a link to a webpage about it.
..would be a point that very well could begin to erode MS's stronghold. Sure, it will keep you using Exchange for the short term. But some kind of migration tool to turn all those mbx's into openexchange or another OSS backend could make the transition on the desktop seamless.
I'd rather see the development of Thunderbird/Sunbird than Evolution.
TB/SB is already cross platform and has a better framework than Evolution.
They don't even have a beagle port for Linux yet! Easy jabs aside, why are you porting software that is still in version 0.0.4 that most users can't get to work on their native system? Maybe working on cross-compatibility from the ground up is the idea, but Beagle could really use some full time programmers just getting it to work, period, and then maybe get Dashboard up and running for non-hackers.
- Exchange Server Integration
- Calendar Integration
- Bluetooth Integration
I, for one, will be anxiously awaiting a release.http://gatewayink.com
What Windows apps would Novell be porting over to Linux exactly? You want all the other companies that develop for Windows to port their stuff to Linux... which isn't going to happen unless Linux gets a little more desktop marketshare. Evolution on Windows is another step in providing an easy migration path. It makes groupware available as something that can be slowly migrated over.
I am presuming that your complaint would be that if they already have Evolution on Windows why would they switch to Linux? Perhaps because, as nice as Evolution might be on Windows, the Windows version of Evolution is never going to be as fast, as nice and as integrated as it is on Linux - where it fits in elegantly as part of GNOME.
I've seen a migration go almost exactly like that: they started with Windows versions of one or two Linux apps, added a few more, and then a few more, and found themselves wondering why exactly they weren't just running Linux where all these applications came preinstalled into their native environment by default. Migration to Linux (at least for that segment of the company) followed shortly after.
Evolution, in combination with the likes of OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and all the other bits and pieces can very effectively spark a similar migration on a wider scale as it provides migration apps for a much wider array of users.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
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We've had pretty good alternatives to Word and Excel available on Windows for years. But the retraining and file compatibility issues prevent most people from going over.
Now if people suddenly start abandoning Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer for cross-platform alternatives, then sure, everybody would start asking "Why are we paying all those licensing fees for Windows when Linux is free?" Don't see that happening any time soon.
Kontact works for me - much faster than Mozilla calendar, and doesn't require a webdav server (shared IMAP folder works.)
That's OK. Just as long as everyone keeps using and enjoying OpenOffice, and using Psi to connect to our new Jabber server, and Firefox to use our web applications (FreeBSD/PostgreSQL/Zope), and now Evolution to read the email that gets filtered by our happy little Postfix server before it can choke the Exchange server to death, I'll smile and nod in agreement.
The truth of the matter is that except for one or two in-house apps, everything our employees use is either a port from Unix or interacting with a Unix server. We're really not that far from being able to drop Windows altogether, and Evolution will close the largest part of that gap.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
At least one Evolution developer has said he would quit if Evolution was ported to Windows.
He's now in a the tough spot of deciding whether to eat his words or actually quit.
I think most of the stability issues are sorted now - they certainly are on my FC3 box. I'd buy a pizza for whoever fixes Palm syncing, though. It's currently horribly broken syncing to my Tungsten E and has been for years.
MS' Office suite has a stranglehold in corporate offices but while many people are used to Outlook, using a different email client is not out of the question. It's often Excel and PowerPoint and Word documents floating around that causes business people to have little choice (because like 95+% of their peers use it - inside/outside the company).
/. crowd is very anti-MS but the reality is, most business people really don't care about this stuff. As long as it gets the job done they're cool. Business people who might raise an eyebrow are CIOs who want to cut costs but MS could easily give away Outlook and see the situation as a "we got take it in the gut to keep Word, Excel and PowerPoint entrenched." Do not be surprised if MS were to take such a stance.
/. crowd may also laugh at "retraining costs" argument (since invariably companies do consider this) since we're talking "email" here. However, given the amazing inflexibility I've witnessed with the average person during my lifetime (even among the tech ranks), there's some teeth to this argument.
Email on the other hand is a different story. I was very impressed with Evolution on LINUX. Having a Windows port would at least pry one finger on Microsoft's stranglehold in corporate offices... maybe.
I know the
If they did, the motivation for CIOs to use Evolution disappears.
There's also the security argument but many larger companies have wised up and your Joe Average User runs in a limited account to stop their desktop from becoming a festering pool of viruses.
The
Home users often fall in a few buckets:
1) Web based mail
2) AOL mail
3) Still blissfully ignorant and using Outlook Express
4) Have a geek friend who has proselytized open source and are now running an open source email client, e.g., Mozilla's client.
That leaves primarily the third group (and some segment of the fourth group) as candidates for Evolution. Assuming NOVELL doesn't expect to charge people for this. This will have some impact but nothing dramatic.
I personally, gasp, went back to Outlook. I liked the changes they made in Office 2003 and they eliminated some of the annoyances I had with previous versions of Outlook. I operated with the Mozilla email client for quite some time having eschewed Office 2000 and Office XP.
I would be happy to go to Evolution if for no other reason than I discovered that MS is as usual thwarting my attempt to run securely. Being a super savvy user (as well as a developer/security person) I happen to run Outlook in a stunted account, i.e. I run it in a different account (Windows "runas" command) and played with ACLs so that sensitive areas such as C:\WINDOWS and "C:\Program Files" can't be written to). You might ask why I didn't create a limitd account and run Outlook with that. Turns out if you do, Office will not leverage Windows XP's themes. Stupid. I don't like the "classic" Windows motif and prefer the default that comes with Windows XP. Anyway,
I discovered much to my chagrin that despite running Outlook in this fashion if I were to run Word (under my normal desktop account), save a document, then try to reopen that document later, Word simply cannot find the document. It will repeatedly stick up an error dialog on each attempt UNTIL I close Outlook, which happens to be running under a different user!!!
I've done Win32 development. It would seem the moronic MS Office development is generating a cookie, alias, moniker, etc., based on the window station I am logged into. They are probably using the Win32 handle and are keying into some shared memory. God for all you know they could be generating strings and putting them into the Global Atom Table.
Why would they do such a thing? Because *no one* would EVER think of running desktop apps in a secure fashion... right? What they have done is simply architecturally unsound.
If you are curious about Window stations:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?u
Communists believe in communal control over communal resources, where there is a planar social heirarchy - that is, everyone is on the same level. There are no consumers, producers, or managers - just people. The controls are all artifacts of human nature taking over human intellect. In communism there are no instant-gratification, tangible incentives (namely capital, be it money, land, or equipment) to perform at a higher level. Thus, in Soviet Russia the incentives to work became not being whacked by the secret police, not being thrown into siberia, etc. But, in pure communism, no one owns anything and government, money, capital in general are not needed. Everyone works for the common good.
Much of the centralized control and secrecy came out of Stalin and his...well...he was just fucked in the head. He brought the facism and violence to post-revolutionary Russia
Microsoft, on the other hand, would be an example of the evils of US capitalism - incentivising the destruction/consumption of competition in the name of worldly success, with very little thought to the long-term consquesnces to the consumer. This brings your walmarts, starbuckses, the destruction of small business and the uniform feel of department stores.
But, hey, I could just be talking out my ass.
Well, as a home user, apart from the current games, nothing much is needed.
For corporate users however, there are lots of things missing, like Lotus groupware clients, accounting packages, decent OCR, industry standard CAD (just a few out of the top of my head, there are lots of specific applications that just don't exist).
It's probable that Wine can help run quite a few of those things. However you probably forfeit support if you run it in that environment...
Install an X server in Windows then.
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In order to port GIMP to win32 Tor had to port GTK+ to win32. I would imagine that is why Novell hired him more than the GIMP part.
The lack of a Native GTK+ port for the Mac is probably a major brick wall to a native port of Evolution to the Mac.