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Oracle and Mozilla Foundation Work Quietly Together
KenDaMan writes "CNet is running a story about the ties between Oracle and the Mozilla Foundation. Oracle hired three people to work on Mozilla Lightning. This project, which aims to integrate Mozilla's calendar application, Sunbird, with its e-mail application, Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook. Is Oracle getting set make an Open Source offering?"
MozillaZine is running a story, too, and it's probably a little more truthful...
ZDNet Tries to Get to the Bottom of the Oracle-Mozilla Relationship
R.Mo
Please don't make Thunderbird any more bloated than it alread is. Why must a calendar be integrated with e-mail anyways?
Had you read the Mozilla Lightning link, you would have seen that this is a "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality." A Thunderbird extension. (That said, I could see this eventually being an optional component included with the installer so that it's more Outlook-like and doesn't require users to go somewhere to download it, assuming they even know about it in the first place.)
R.Mo
Its for office automation. I used to use Outlook at work, and the one awesome feature was that my boss could just send me appointments, and I could accept them into my schedule.
Rest of the program was shit, though.
The previous sig has been removed due to
I can think of at least one other. When you want to create a new meeting you can have Outlook autopick the best time for everyone on your invite list based on their calendars.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Because mailing appointments and invites and auto arranging meetings is Very Handy for largish workgroups.
As in, cost saving for planning and secretary work.
Please gimme it in firefox with thunderbird connected to a choice of webservers, a choice of Db's and I'll be rolling this out pronto.
Heck, I could start a business around it.
Nope. Articles I have read over the years, such as this or this, tell me that Ellison hates Gates.
Perhaps I should have posted the links above in my original comment.
Oracle already bought out Steltor's CorporateTime, which was an Exchange Killer, and then buried it in proprietary bullshit. I've since moved over to Exchange4Linux, which, barring the poor name, I feel really is an Exchange Killer.
Basically the entire thing runs inside of Postfix and PostgreSQL. It's written in Python, and the server software is 100% open source. The Outlook Connector is not (it too is written in Python). So far it's been working great (huge datastore, calendaring, delegation, it all works). Basically N-H went about it differently than all the others: instead of making Outlook wrap around open services, they made the open services conform to Microsoft's bastardized MAPI. I have to say this has owrked better than anything else I've found.
OpenExchange?
There is nothing wrong with an Oracle back-end. As others have pointed out it will be ported onto postgres toute de suite. Let's face it Oracle loves postgres because people who start out small and mid=size come to Oracle's door when the load get's really large. Loads only get really large when business is good; when business is good there is money to be spent on a big time db for the back end. If you started out on psql the port to Oracle is pretty easy.