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

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.

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: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.