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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."
there sure are a lot of open source hippies getting jobs today.
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
I hear Kentucky has already started the port of Creationism to Windows. Lets hope the right team delivers first.
This write-up is pretty short. Maybe a sentence about Evolution would be nice.. or at least a link to a webpage about it.
Seeing as how the submitter neglected to link to the actual announcement, here it is: http://nat.org/2005/january/#17-January-2005
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
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.
..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.
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.
I'd rather see the development of Thunderbird/Sunbird than Evolution.
TB/SB is already cross platform and has a better framework than Evolution.
Last I checked, Beagle 2 was delivered to the general vincinity of Mars just fine. Granted, maybe it was delivered just a few meters too deep, but on a distance of millions of kilometers, who's counting?
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
- Exchange Server Integration
- Calendar Integration
- Bluetooth Integration
I, for one, will be anxiously awaiting a release.http://gatewayink.com
No.
Odds are pretty good that migration is an on going process. It is very hard to move "everything" at once to a new platform. One of the reasons that Windows did so well was that it ran dos apps.
A company that is thinking of moving will want to do it a step at a time.
I know my company is trying to do it now. Oh how people complained when we made them dump outlook for Thunderbird. Not to mention how some complained about using OpenOffice because it did not work EXACTLY like word.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
(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
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.
The beta part is having Evolution connect to a Groupwise server, which is rather unlike servers that Evolution was originally intended to connect to. If you are running Linux and want to connect to a Groupwise server you can use Groupwise client for Linux. Groupwise server supports the Outlook client so what it appears they may be actually doing is making a transition of the groupware client from Groupwise while retaining the server component, cross-platform. It would be a lovely thing indeed. Novell server products tend to be excellent. Client products like the Groupwise client historically blows dogs.
and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows."
An obscure company called "Microsoft" have already beaten him to it.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
"modern day commie".
Hippies has feeling too you know!
this is great news - this will help the migrations later when users finally get sick of paying microsoft for viruses and spyware.
...what the heck Evolution is, you can find more info on it here, but it's basically an email/address book/calendar program, a la Outlook, for Gnome. A link in the article itself might have helped, especially since Novell seems to be targetting Windows users like me, who also (coincidentally?) haven't heard of the program.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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
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.
That's all very well, but when are they going to port Wine to Windows?
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.
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.
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
Or is that the wrong way round?
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
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.
This is what non-geeks would do to shift to Open Source:
Replace Windows search feature with Beagle, browser with FF, Office suite with Oo, Paint with GiMP, etc.
This is what geeks would do to shift to Open Source:
Install Linux.
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.