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Campaign to Open Source IBM's Notes/Domino

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the if-you-can't-sell-it-use-it-for-free-advertising dept.

Ian Tree, an IT consultant from the Netherlands, has started a campaign to convince IBM to open source the code for Notes/Domino. Hoping for results similar to the push for Sun to open source Solaris, which finally saw success in 2005, Tree makes the simple point that it won't happen until someone asks. "By being an open source product, Tree is also hoping that Domino becomes something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts, which is the holy grail for future market adoption. This is how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized. While the idea of open sourcing any proprietary program is appealing, in as much as it sets a program free to live beyond the commitment (or lack thereof) of its originator, it is hard to see why open Notes/Domino would have any more impact than OpenSolaris."

3 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. *ring*ring* by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hi, can I talk to the product manager of Outlook? Thanks, I'll hold.

    Hello? Hi, I think it would be spiffy if you would consider open-sourcing Outlook. No, the whole shebang, not just the client. Yeah, server side components and everything.

    I think it would prolong the life of the product since it would allow it to exist beyond your commitment to it. And you know, as the saying goes, more eyes lead to shallower bugs.

    So what I'm proposing is that you open up the source and give it away for free. Then you could...

    Hello? Hello?

  2. Slow news day? by DXLster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.

    If you want to develop open source applications ON TOP of Notes/Domino -- you can just look to http://www.openntf.org/

  3. What was it before there was Firefox? by erroneus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ah yes, Netscape. I was never a fan of Netscape. I thought MSIE was better and faster for the longest while. Netscape was, at one time, very closed. But once things got going, Firefox came out of it. Perhaps the same might happen with this? People WANT an open source groupware server and the ones that exist now seem to lack in one way or another. But perhaps a project that starts with working code, just as Firefox started out, could turn into something a lot better... something that could kick Exchange and MS Office to the curb.