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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?"
Is Oracle getting set make an Open Source offering?
I dunno. Is Slashdot getting set make good English on the Editor?
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.
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.
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.