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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...
I hear Kentucky has already started the port of Creationism to Windows. Lets hope the right team delivers first.
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.
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.
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
(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
Anything that Access can do can be done better for free with MySQL
... I'm still confused what cheap/free GUI clients are available for MySQL since MySQL.com abandonded their MySQLGUI project.
Access the database may suck, but Access the GUI client is pretty nice. Sometimes people don't care about referential integrity, they just want an easy to use tool for organizing data, but want something better then a spreadsheet.
The GUI clients for MySQL are lacking
When you're creating relations between tables, a graphical table editor and a GUI that lays everything out for you is pretty nice and takes away alot of the eliteness of the DB world. I can get a moderately experienced office worker setup with Access very quickly, but using MySQL requires more experience.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
"modern day commie".
Hippies has feeling too you know!
DBDesigner4 is an open-source database designer for MySQL. It's not really a replacement for Access, as it doesn't have a form designer for non-techies to enter records. But for all the fancy stuff like designing databases and forming queries, it's beautiful. My one beef is that it depends on Kylix, and as such I still can't compile it in Ubuntu. Worked great in Gentoo though.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
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