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?"

Comments

Well..

[Sv-Manowar]

Its good to see big companies like Oracle working on alternatives to Microsoft's exchange server software, Sunbird will be the better for this collaboration

Testing the Waters

[CyberNigma]

Oracle is probably just testing the waters before trying to dominate a field that it can't just buy. I don't see them as pro-open source, more like use open-source just until we come out on top.

Re:what about Novell?

[CdBee]

yes, but a Gnome app will never be really happy running on Windows or OSX due to the overhead in terms of libraries to load. XUL is fully crossplatform and has the same requirements on any system - and with the coming dominance of Firefox, there are a lot of people out there learning XUL programming.

Dear god no...

[benjamindees]

Please don't make Thunderbird any more bloated than it alread is. Why must a calendar be integrated with e-mail anyways?

Re:The real challenge

[peacefinder]

Ah, if only that were so. My lock-in to Office is mainly through Outlook, and I don't have an Exchange server. OOo is perfectly adequate for every general-office need we have, except for one person who needs Excel.

The problem is that our Oracle-based electronic medical records application will only support Outlook for sending secure e-mails. I would love to put Mozilla everywhere, but instead I had to buy Outlook licenses. It's downright painful.

Anything that makes Mozilla easier for the EMR app's developers to support is a good idea in my book. If Oracle likes Moz, that'll help me convince the EMR vendor that it's worthy of their support too.

Exchange Killers

[Doc Ruby]

My favorite way to break the MS control of corporate groupware is the OSS project Open-Xchange. It's a Linux server that replaces MS-Exchange (without users even needing to know), with an Outlook plugin, and Evolution compatibility (through open standards). It is a hub server that uses standard interop with other server types, like Samba, SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, and SQL, so the services it bundles to the client can be delivered by existing servers, or the installer's choice of (standards) compatible ones. The source is open, and it's got a documented plugin API, as well as an open, documented data schema available to any additional apps. And it's the core of Novell's GroupWise suite, so it can be upgraded to a version supported by Novell's global staff. It runs on Linux, so its uptime and scalability are reliable. With O-X working, it's no longer necessary to rely on MS Exchange to get MS Exchange features.

FWIW, I'd love to see people take the Mozilla/Oracle code for improving Fire/Thunderbird, and improve their integration with O-X. That kind of cross-pollination is perfect for OSS, and leaves proprietary competition, like MS Exchange, standing behind like a stick in the mud.

Re:The real challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be honest -- Exchange Server is the worst groupware server on the market. It's slow, was unreliable for years, and has retarded limitations like a 16GB mail store in the standard version.

The only thing that's ever sold Exchange is the Outlook client and the good integration with MS Office (plus the MS brandname). If Lotus wasn't so fugly and locked into "SmartSuite", they would still own the groupware market.

Don't think so

[rsax]

Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook.

I doubt that. What makes Microsoft LookOut so appealing to big business, or even small business for that matter, is not that it's a great email client - it's the intergration with MS Exchange. Shared contact list, scheduling, folders, all from a central location. Is there a Mozilla server in the works?

You can have shared address books using LDAP but can you modify those contacts directly from the email client? Until that can happen lets not get too excited.

Re:Don't think so

[SolusSD]

I don't know if Mozilla Lightning will allow you to do that, but KDE's kontact (Combines KDE's Kmail, Address book, Calander, Notes, Journal, Aggregator, etc) does do all of the above. I believe the last several releases of it put it leaps and bounds over any other Personal Information Manager. Spam filters, antivirus filters, and hell it even reminds you to attach a file to your email if you refered to attaching a file in the email! ;) I encourage everyone running KDE out there to give it a shot.

Only 3 people

[Hrrrg]

Amazing that the addition of only three full-time employees is expected to create a product that might challenge the largest company on the planet.

Re:what about Novell?

[ramone1234]

Slightly OT here, but wouldn't it do XUL a world of good to work in IE too? I download and registered the mozilla activex control ( http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm ) and I can run XUL apps in IE now (after setting my activex permissions appropriately). The plug-in seems to run XUL apps just fine, and it's a relatively small download. Is there any plan to market/package this activex as a browser plug-in? It seems like you'd get an explosion of XUL apps then, with nearly 100% of the browser market supporting it.

Re:MS vs Others

[Tape_Werm]

You're going on the assumption that the open source zealots actually think ahead. All they can see is what's in front of them right now. Say what you want, but if you remove Microsoft, prepare for another 800lb gorilla to fill the gap (less evil, more evil? Does it matter? One mans devil is another mans god). It WILL happen. And don't let yourself believe otherwise.

Keeping on topic, for Thunderbird to beat out outlook, it'll take a LOT more than calendar functionality.

I may be a Microsoft apologist, but even -I- know that Firefox/Mozilla blows the shit out of IE. Christ, even if IE were as secure as fort knox (which of course, it's about as secure as an open door and a sign stating what's on the inside to steal), the tabbed browsing alone blows IE out of the water. With that in mind, I figured, well, if FF/Moz is that good, perhaps Thunderbird is as good or better than Outlook... boy was I wrong... it was a nightmare to set up: maybe I'm dumb, but I had to reinstall it like 3 times to get the folder setup I liked, and even then it was not to my liking. Its message rules system is horribly broken, the interface is inconsistent, etc.. There were a lot of problems for a program that has a 1.0 version number attached. One feature of outlook I can't live without and thunderbird lacks is the archiving functionality. Don't get me wrong, it's a good start, but it has a long way to go before toppling outlook, and it'll take more than a calendar to do it.

And before you think I only installed and ran it for a day or two, you're mistaken. I used it for 4 months!!! just so I could give it a fair chance. (which is more than most of the slashdot zealots would do for anything that isn't open source or linux related.)

Yeah yeah, I know, viruses, etc.. But you know something? I haven't received an email virus in about 2 years now. Roughly the length of time I've been using Outlook 2003... hmm go figure on that. And when I had received them before that (which was far and few between), I USED COMMON SENSE, and surprise surprise, I wasn't infected by anything. It's got its flaws, but Outlook has functionality and a design layout that's still much better than anything offered today. Yeah, I'll be the first to agree there's a lot of bloat (vb scripting in an email client? That's some crack induced thinking). But I'll take ease-of-use + caution any day over security + unnecessary complexity + broken design any day. Until thunderbird = security + consistent design + ease of use, I wont be going back to it.

I read that as...

[SharpFang]

Is Oracle getting set make an Open Office suffering?"

Re:Ok maybe open source

[hedora]

According to mozilla's site, the current version uses an embedded SQL engine for the calendar. It will probably use LDAP for address book stuff, since thunderbird already does that.

I suspect the point of this project is to implement the middleware that is needed to allow collaboration between multiple calendar users. As long as everything written on top of the SQL/LDAP interface is open source, then small organizations could drop in something like postgres, while larger organizations would probably want something like oracle. This seems to be a nice setup for everyone involved.

I'm not familiar with oracle's filesystem layer, but I don't see why straight SQL wouldn't support this application nicely. AFAIK, WebDAV doesn't have sophisticated conflict resolution mechanisms, which is really the main thing that an application like this needs.

Will it do contacts management?

[denis-The-menace]

Currently Moz or Thund. cannot manage contacts anywhere near like OLK.
-You can't print 20 to a page
-you don't have the same number of fields.
-phone numbers to auto re-format themselves when you type them in.
-etc.
If this was fixed, I would jump in a heart beat.

Re:The real challenge

[H310iSe]

I too disagree that Exchange is the key, I've been looking for a windows based calendar/email/contacts integrated client forever and can't find anything that can touch outlook. And that's not a very high bar to cross. If ANYone comes out w/ one I'll have my clients off Outlook so fast it'll make MS's head spin. Screw Exchange, for small businesses (all my clients are businesses w/ less than 20 employees) I can work just fine without it. I mean, sure, there needs to be a way to share the calendar info, but that is way, way less than an exchange server and could be supported by any number of client-ish hacks.

Give me the client side and I'll be such a happy camper.

Re:The real challenge

[ozric99]

Outlook is not the real key to beat Microsoft on the Office front - but Exchange.

No, you have it backwards. The lock-in is with Outlook, not Exchange. Nobody cares what's running in the server room and Outlook generally plays well with other vendors' server offerings. The sticking point is having to retrain everyone to use a different application for email, calendar, discussions, collaboration etc (not to mention syncing with all manner of handheld devices).

Re:MS vs Others

[Anonymous Coward]

The Outlook + viruses argument is older the dot com bomb days.

We've been running Exchange 2000 from the 2nd week it came out and upgraded 6 mail servers to 2003 within a month of it's arrival as well. We've had 1 virus make it through email to this date. Call it competent admins or smart deciscion making, it doesn't matter. Sybari Antigen was our savior at the end of the day. Yes, it's a blatent advertisment...

I guess I just laugh when people *actually* have virus problems at a business. It comes down to incompetent admins and poor deciscion making. At the end of the day you can't blame users for inept virus protection when your server lets them right in.

Re:The real challenge

[Asphixiat]

Webcal :
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php

Thunderbird - disconnected IMAP & postfix & squirel mail.

They had to trust me at first.....but now my company will never look back - Oh and ban outlook unless they absolutly have to use it, like the accountant, who emails directly from MYOB - ie MAPI - then just configure outlook express to send email, but only open Thunderbird to read the reply.

We do keep a windows PDC for central authentication, look at winbind from the samba install - a daemon that you can write pam modules for any daemon to authenticate from the central server. And use rdiff-backup - it rocks for backing up your fileserver a special archive you can get any copy of any backed up file for the last year or more if you have a big enough hard drive :)

Hope that gets you started, oh and openvpn is the shit, with linux and windows support :) and dont forget your jabber server - all encryped jabber and IMAP of course :)