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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?"
"CNet is running a story about the ties between Oracle and the Mozilla Foundation..."
Yeah. A running news story on at least two large news sites. Pretty good job keeping the lid on this one, Oracle and Moz!
But they are probably wanting you to use an oracle back end.
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.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Is Oracle getting set make an Open Source offering?
I dunno. Is Slashdot getting set make good English on the Editor?
Oracle is by no means doing this philanthropically. They're doing it because Ellison despises Gates and Ballmer, and he's seen what Firefox has done.
He's a bragart, and if Lightning delivers what Firefox has, you can be sure he'll be publicly thumbing his nose at Gates.
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
Outlook is not the real key to beat Microsoft on the Office front - but Exchange.
As soon as you can free companies from the Exchange lock in and offer a better alternative then you have a chance.
Most people for example love OpenOffice, but won't switch, since they also need Outlook which is connected to the data on the Exchange server.
No Exchange server - no underlaying windows server. No Outlook - no Microsoft Office.
So what's needed is a strong Thunderbird for Office slaves and an Exchange replacement - plus total data import.
Oracle has been trying since forever for enterprises to take up its Enterprise email offering (which works with Outlook AFAIK. I'm pretty sure they'd love to give a free rich client to their customers, which could explain their love for Mozilla Calendar. And yeah, if open standards-based Calendaring catches on, one of the biggest reasons to use proprietary software (Notes/Exchange) goes away.
If Open-Sourcers had a strategy department, they'd make Mozilla Calendar the most important product they have to ship, far more important than Firefox. Unfortunately (or fortunately for IBM/MS) things don't quite work that way.
Go somewhere random
I always thought this until I started working at a big company and realised just how quick & easy it was to have calendar & mail in one place with todo lists & other stuff.
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
Why must a calendar be integrated with e-mail anyways?
Because it's great to get an invitation via email, which you can add to your calendar with one click, rather than re-entering the info?
Because I leave my email program running all the time, and I'd rather not have to leave another calendar program running as well?
Because both email and calendars have a pretty integral relation to a to-do list, and it's nice not to have to keep track of 2 lists, or do the whole copy-paste thing from one to the other. I just click on an email, mark it for follow-up by X date, and it's in my to-do list. Same with stuff I need to get done before an appointment.
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
Here's a thought.....
Its not secret anymore. With the release of Solaris 10 as free, is it any wonder that Oracle would look at opening its market share a bit with a similar move.
I think the real news here is that F/OSS is having an effect on the software industry. I believe that effect is a good one. Solaris 10 might not be the best thing I've ever seen, its a start. Oracle working in their domain space to open up things like CRM, SAP, and other areas is a damn good thing. If they can produce something that opens these and other markets to F/OSS then the competition gets tougher and more wide spread.
The opening of Microsoft dominated markets is nothing but good news. Any weakening of their grip on the software industry in any domain opens up that market so even proprietary vendors have a shot at it.
This move doesn't surprise me at all, in fact, I believe that we will see much more of this. It costs very little in terms of lock-in and other long term financial factors to work with F/OSS to open up a market that is practically locked down by a single vendor, whether that vendor is Microsoft or not.
A long time ago, it was said that you could never get fired for buying big blue. That kind of reputation is one that Microsoft never achieved. The software industry began changing so fast that it never could get that reputation, but the fallout of the fast paced changes is that if you have a reputation of great support and super value for money you will end up with market share. This is still in the process of becomming a defacto standard.
As F/OSS products become more technically and financially strong, it is in the best interests of any software vendor to work with those products, even promote and support them.
A product or two that runs on an Oracle backend product and directly competes with Microsoft etc. is a good thing... it opens up the market to more competition. If it will run on Oracle, it can probably run on mySQL etc. What options it ends up with is of little concern if it takes market share from the dominant player in that market.
Since people with little budgets are not Oracles main revenue stream, these new products would directly mangle revenue streams of Microsoft and make Oracle the version that you would use if you had to scale to large size operations.
It just makes sense.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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
My boss sends me an invite to an annoying meeting. I click "accept" (unfortunately). It gets copied to my agenda and synchronised to my phone. 15 minutes before the meeting, my phone starts beeping and sais "QM meeting, room AX5". All with ONE mouseclick. Do this in open source and I will WALK all the way to Redmond to tell Billy he should stick a fork in it.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
- If competitor has product that is clear market leader, make your product open source. That hurts competitors. Just giving up helps them.
- If competitor has another product that is not directly competing with your product, cut their money flow by developing free alternative.
I think Oracle using number 2 against microsoft.Dyslexics have more fnu.
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.