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Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary
alphadogg is one of several readers to note the opening of the Mozilla Foundation's new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, charged with developing the free, open source Thunderbird email software. Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring and better search. ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software.
The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging and how Thunderbird could make a difference there... and slashdot links to mostly useless informationweek and zdnet stories?? Bleh...
David Ascher really gives me hope for where things are going - but he can't do it alone. And he can't get the people who'd help to do so if he's being ignored!
I would like to see a search capability like that in the defunct Bloomba e-mail client (now the basis of WordPerfect Mail). The entire text of every piece of mail was indexed which made searches very fast. It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria. A given mail could appear in several folders, not just one. The company called it a Personal Content Database. The Bloomba client also incorporated a calendar and an anti-spam proxy.
The company producing the software, Stata Labs, sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
If you build it, people will come.
My two cents.
All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I've been hearing that for at least 10 years now, be it with Linux or other non-Microsoft software ventures. Truth is, Microsoft is still there and it still beats the crap out of most of its competition by virtue of its monopolies.
I love Linux as much as the next guy, I use it professionally, but Microsoft is still the big rabid dog of a bad software company it's always been, and it won't go away anytime soon.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
That's a nice thought, but if I had a dime for every time someone said a particular piece of technology would be the death of Microsoft, I could buy Microsoft and kill it myself.
You're absolutely right. I'm sure that the XBox360's higher install number and sales rate that keeps pace with the PS3 are all just a backwards sign of it's utter failure. With the rate that Windows is losing ground to Linux, it'll only be another 30 years before it's no longer the dominant player! Windows Mobile also being the dominant player in that field is a fluke, I'm sure, and it's going to fail soon. When you take those factors into account, they've only got a few decades of ridiculous power and profits! THEY'RE DOOMED!!!!
That is, unless they break into a new market or do just about anything else that keeps the status quo. Also, since Firefox hasn't cut IE's install rate to below 50%, the terms "embarrass" and "decimate" might be premature, although decimate does technically apply.
Lord I hope so. Right now we're approaching it from the other end; using Zimbra to support Outlook users. I'd love to offer a complete groupware solution that worked cross-platform...
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
What's a "death knoll"? Are MS going to be wiped out by some evil killer hillock? Or will it they be put out to graze on a grassy knoll?
Are the Qualcomm developers who support Penelope part of this? Will their work be incorporated into Thunderbird, or is it a separate project?
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
*And yet MS still controls an approximate 75% of the web browser market, Windows still controls an approximate 90% of the OS market, and there has been more than 2x as many 360's as there are PS3s sold.
As much as I might like Linux and OSS ideologies to replace Windows and MS, I honestly believe you would have to be living in dream land to think that MS is all of the sudden going to implode, let alone do it within the next 2-3 years. Just like Firefox has slowly and steadily taken market share from IE6+7, Linux will slowly and steadily take market share from Windows.
Why won't it happen fast? Firefox is a (if not the) poster child OSS program, and receives a significant amount of word of mouth advertising. It is free (in many ways, but cost is the only one that the vast majority cares about), and is almost 100% of the time rated as better than IE in reviews. And yet despite all these reasons its (albeit growing) market share is around 15%, compared to the vastly worse IE 6's 42ish% and IE 7's 32ish%.
Obviously, technical superiority and free-ness are not good enough reasons to get everyone to switch over in one big surge. Over time as Linux and OSS software in general continues to improve, the momentum to change will increase, but this change will not happen overnight. Here's to hoping for a majority market share in the next 3-4 years, but I wouldn't bet money on anything less than 6 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it took 10 or more.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic or defeatist, but rather realistic. If it weren't for the fact that I am a tech nerd and encouraged people to switch I think nearly all my friends and family would still be using IE, let alone know what Linux is.
*Disclaimer: Yes I realize no market share analyzer is 100%, or even 90% accurate, and yes I realize these often have a tendency to under-represent Linux, but these statistics do give at least a general idea of where the majority is at.
With the openchange project working on libmapi, I could certainly see this as a possibility. The SOAP calls that were previously relied by Evolution and Apple Mail on are far too slow and unstable.
Lightning supports both WebDAV and CalDAV, which allow calendar sharing. It plays with google calendar & Apple's iCal. It just doesn't play with Outlook/Exchange.
Evolution works with exchange, as does MS's Outlook Web Access.
Supports "the big four." And then some.
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I kind of agree. I think too much is made of beating Windows and replacing it with any alternative, where most users don't want to buy in to that zealotry (or perfect ideal, depending on your viewpoint). What would make a big difference is to let users keep Windows and slowly undermine the applications they run on there - reducing the marketshare of Office would stick MS where it really hurts.
If thunderbird could beat Outlook and Exchange then that'd be quite something - but it'd need to integrate very easily with Active Directory, and Exchange calendaring (or no existing Outlook user could user it). Nobody really cares about integrated IM though, the challenge lies in making it work with what the user currently uses.
That's partly how firefox made it - you could replace IE with it and continue to do everything you used to do. Its a shame I cannot replace Outlook with Thunderbird in the same way.
The Mozilla Foundation has the money, bit I like the KDE applications better. Kmail beats Thunderbird by far - and the rest of the kde-pim applications are pretty well developed. Could the Mozilla Foundation join forces with KDE? there are many, many challenges. For example there is an urgend need for an appication that synchronizes with your online calendar and your cell phone. KDE applications could use somthing like Linkification and severals other Mozilla addons, Mozilla needs help in evrythin which is not a browser.
A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world. They like to point out that no open source program interfaces properly with its calendaring function, damning all these clients to hobbyist hell. It has become an obsession.
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I am Oracle's calendar, you insensitive clod! See if I ever give you a date again.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.
Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.
Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?
Including sit physically secure in my server room? I hate Exchange too, and also think email clients should stick to email instead of adding the kitchen sink, but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on.
Exchange isn't going to die anytime soon. No matter how good Google Aps is, no one with half a brain and a medium to large buisness.. is going to give Google power over their email severs. Too many sensitive documents go out and come in, through email. No one wants someone else to have power over their business by controlling access to those documents. Sure, we geeks can tout it as a triumph of innovation or whatever the buzz word is this week, but you'll never see google aps as a replacement for Exchange and Outlook. And those two products really should be called one product, because its not till you put them together that either really shines. Its a symbiotic relationship. You can't build a better open source exchange server and have it succeed without a better open source version of outlook. Want to see Exchange die? Lock the writers of Qmail and Thunderbird in a room for a few months, and keep delivering them beer and pizza through a mail slot.
I happen to be one of the unfortunate masses whose employer insists on MS Exchange for all its scheduling needs. Since I work on a linux box, this is a constant source of frustration. My day job will become noticeably easier if the OpenChange project yields a solid and reasonably featured open source Exchange client.