Slashdot Mirror
Campaign to Open Source IBM's Notes/Domino
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."
Speaking on behalf of the poor bastards that have played with Notes: Please don't put him on our team. Really, Notes is like the last kid to get picked when we're making teams. He drops the ball lots and he cries even when we play tag only. We only let him play at all because the teacher makes us.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The perfect storm of horrible interface design. If only we could get the geniuses behind Band-in-a-Box on board.
CouchDB, which has been generating some hype lately (especially among Rails fans), is by Damien Katz, who did work on LotusNotes and Domino, and claims CouchDB is inspired by that.
According to him, Lotus got a lot of things wrong, but it got the database right.
I don't know if there would be anything to gain from the original (even just to read through it), or if we should all be focused on CouchDB now, but it would be interesting to find out.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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?
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/
...the horrors that must lie waiting within the source code for Lotus Notes.
Schools could use the Notes source to teach the basics of how to build slow, confusing, fragile applications with utterly non-standard user interfaces. Notes is by far the worst piece of software I use regularly. On the other hand, opening its source would let me fix that bug that keeps reminding me I missed the same meeting reminders over and over again.
/...
As I state in the title, companies only open-source unprofitable products. As I understand it, Sun was willing to open-source Solaris because it was no longer profitable by itself - instead, it was just driving sales of Sun hardware. Until I see some similar evidence regarding Notes (showing that its unprofitable on its own and only drives sales of other IBM products), call me a skeptic of this effort.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I fail to see how making Notes open-source would help this aim. After all, the main obstacle to people using calendaring and groupware apps is that said apps are difficult to use. Given Notes' horrible record regarding usability, I fail to see how making Notes freely available to all would spread the usage of calendaring amongst the general computing public.
In fact, I think that GMail and Google Calendar are doing more to spread automated calendaring than open-sourcing Notes (or even Outlook, for that matter) ever could.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
There's extremely good compatibility between Outlook and a Domino mail server owing to the connectors available from either IBM or Microsoft (Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for Domino, respectively).
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.
You not only want to expose the source code of Bloated Goats to the world but intentionally expose young people to it? Good Lord, man, have you no mercy in soul at all?
You don't have to actually accept the meeting request, do you?
The last I used something like that I thought you had the option of refusing it? I couldn't refuse them because it was my boss that sent the "request" and I actually liked being included on the meetings as it was better than hearing about the decisions made later on. Not that it really mattered, but every once in a while the upper management would listen (usually by accident).
Never having used Notes myself, I wonder if it had a problem with a certain version that people have fixated on or if poor administration commonly caused some problems that have given people a phobia towards it? I have a friend who hates config files even though I've watched (and helped) him look through tabs (the kind with subsections in each one) in a GUI for options we know we saw SOMEWHERE earlier for up to 10 minutes! When I pointed out that at least with a text file you can "search" for some part of the text, he just dismissed it. He has a personal hatred for text files and nothing will shake him of that, not even direct evidence of the advantages. I personally prefer both, a text file with a nice GUI that you can still access directly if you want to do so.
The code you want doesn't belong to you. It belongs to IBM's shareholders. If you want it, make an offer.
Sincerely,
IBM.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Let's see, you can either have everyone keep up their calendar, or you can waste 3-5 minutes * n people in an average meeting * number of meetings in a year. There's a reason companies will pay the bucks they do for groupware licenses. Add in the workflow stuff they enable (though much of that is moving to web based apps) and they just make sense for many organizations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As a former Notes Sys Administrator, it had its benefits, and its problems. The fact of the matter was that the email and scheduling part of it were never its strengths. The databases, and the applications that it built were by far superior groupware than anything I have seen. Oh to be able to replicate something like Access databases at the click of a button for users who do need to work on data offline. As an earlier commenter said, they got the database right. Everyone just assumed they 'tacked on' the email and calendar as an afterthought to facilitate workflow solutions. Notes Replication was simply the best (when it was configured properly). But having previously installed Notes clients and managed it, I can tell you that setup of the client was a breeze compared to setting up and configuring Exchange/Outlook. From an end user perspective, there were some things they got very right, and still as many they got wrong. But comparing it to Outlook (apart from the few scheduler limitations), it was far cleaner and quicker in so many ways.
I seem to remember best describing it as a slightly multiuser filemaker pro flat format with a lot of hype to rip off IBM for a few billion dollars.
I'm really not sure what it's got to do with FileMaker Pro, as I don't know a lot about Notes. I could compare FileMaker with CouchDB, though:
CouchDB is schema-free. There are no predefined columns. Each record is any JSON object, with no constraints other than that it be valid JSON.
Older versions of FileMaker are, indeed, one table per "database" -- but it was very much a fixed-schema table. Each record had exactly the same fields. I've seen more than one nightmare database which would have been vastly improved by the concept of relationships and multiple tables. Granted, you could relate two "databases", but this was fragile and not for newbies.
What's more, FileMaker requires that you be connected to a central server, and somehow manages to be dog-slow over a network. By contrast, CouchDB can do asynchronous multi-master replication -- to the point of completely disconnected operation. As in, you could run a Couch server on your laptop, take it on the road, connect later, and it would deal with conflicts appropriately.
if it had had a good database to begin with, then, 3rd parties could have salvaged a good groupware database product with add on tools or even clients.
I don't know -- how accessible was the database? Given that it wasn't free, and was tied to Notes (which has a horrible reputation), it's not surprising that people didn't pick up on the database.
Keep in mind, good ideas aren't necessarily adopted right away. There are a lot of strange things about Erlang, but it does scale very well, both to cores and multiple machines -- yet it hasn't had a lot of adoption compared to, say, Java. What's more, there's a grand total of one other language running on the Erlang VM, and as far as I know, no other languages built around the same concept -- if it's really the syntax and weirdness of the language, why not steal the best parts of it?
I could pick other examples, but I think I've made my point: A lack of popularity doesn't necessarily mean something is bad, any more than a lot of hype necessarily means something is good.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I see you've never actually used exchange/outlook, and were just looking to troll about something.
The "decline" button is there for a reason.
I wouldn't use it if it was free!
I had to use that POS back in my days working for a DoD contractor.
Who cares if the underlying db is sound, the client exposed way too much of the db and as a result was a user interface clusternightfuckmare. Yes, it was so bad I had to make up a word for it.
Even Outlook with it's Russian Nesting Doll configuration options*, is a way ahead of Lotus.
*If you're not sure what I mean, follow these instructions for an extreme example from Outlook 2003:
Tools->Options->Mail Setup->Send/Receive...->Edit->Account Properties->Advanced->Remote Mail->Retrieve items->Filter->Advanced.
You'll now be six modal dialogs deep in it's options, past two Advanced buttons!
Further, did you know it's possible to change your domain password from within Outlook's nesting dolls? I'm not kidding! But good luck finding it.
Question everything
"who only seen the Web as a medium a few ages ago"
Only if you consider 1996 to be a few years ago. Domino's biggest problem is that it has been too far ahead of it's competitors, so it is common for people not to understand the benefits that it offers, and by the time the rest of the industry catches up, the features have been rebuild a little different, and the people who now start to understand it complain because the feature that Domino had a decade earlier doesn't look just like the program that was developed this year.
I have been forced to use Lotus Notes at work for 10 years now. If you don't understand why people hate Notes just Google "Lotus Notes sucks" and you'll find plenty of detailed explanations of the several million things that are wrong with Notes.
Notes must die.
It's a command line?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, right. We got that song-and-dance from IBM/Lotus when 5 came out. "5's just as good as Outlook!" It ain't. Then when 6 came out. Oh look! Version 6, someone at IBM finally heard of this thing called a "scrollwheel" and it works... about a third of the time. And hey, guess what, it only took IBM until version 6.5 to get Notes working correctly on a multi-user Windows OS. That's only 10+ years after multi-user Windows OSes came out! Lightning development pace.
The number of extremely trivial, basic features that have *never* worked right is unbelievable-- hell, just try to get Out Of Office messages turned on in less than 3 hours. Oh, and my personal favorite was the lack of any kind of sanity-checking: Notes loved to schedule meetings that ended before they began, which of course broke syncing to every PDA known to man and resulted in an extremely busy helpdesk worker.
Notes is a lost product. Not only does it have a legendarily bad UI, but there's not a single Notes developer capable of writing a good UI; it's simply not in their DNA.
(Yes, yes, I know, now the Notes fan comes in and tells me that our install was "misconfigured", despite the fact that it was the default email configuration from the CD, and tell us that Notes is "more than just email", despite the fact that IBM sold it to us to do email, etc, etc. I've heard it all before; don't bother.)
Comment of the year
I'm not sure that is a good example to point to. Chandler is possible the best example at how to completely fail at an open source project (despite the money being tossed at it) in history.
Besides, Notes beats everything hands down as a groupware platform. The databases driven apps you can deploy rock and replication is amazingly useful. The email/calendar part does really suck though.
The Notes "database" was one of the strengths and weaknesses of Lotus Notes.
Background - speaking strictly about the native Notes Storage Facility (.nsf) format (and not to newer options for RDMS virtualization or or DB2 backend for custom development):
- Everything in Lotus Notes is stored in a "note", each of which has an XML-like data structure. Keep in mind that there was no such thing as XML, or even the internet, when Lotus Notes was first developed.
- User data notes are usually called "documents".
- The components of the design of Lotus Notes application are also stored as XML-like data notes, and are usually called "design elements". So even forms, views, images, script libraries, etc, are stored in "notes".
- The data notes are not dependent on the underlying design elements for their existence. This is a really weird concept for SQL DBAs, where the data is bound to tables for its structure. Drop a table in the SQL world, and you lose your data. In the Notes world, if you delete a field from a form (a design element), the form itself, or even delete views (also design elements)... and the data is unaffected.
- All of the data and design "notes" for a Lotus Notes "database" are stored together a self-contained NSF file.
The loosely structured nature of a native Lotus Notes database means it is both VERY flexible, but lacks some of the rigor (and related benefits) associated with a true RDBMS. Oh, and you can't use SQL to do cool things like left and right outer joins. Instead, you use a Lotus formula language, LotusScript (very similar to Visual Basic), or Java to "lookup" data for display or for repeated storage within a note.
Even Notes data types are much more flexible/loosey-goosey than found in the RDBMS world. They can be boiled down to:
- Text (stored as the equivalent of varchar(32768) in the SQL world)
- Numbers (no need to define integers, floats, or doubles)
- Date/Time
- Rich Text (including attachments, formatting, tables, etc)
- "Name" type fields, which are related to Lotus Notes security.
The loose structure also lowers the barriers of entry to slap together a Notes database. A person can know enough to be productive/dangerous without having a clue about referential integrity, primary keys, or tables.
My problem with Notes was that a lack of a relational structure made it awkward to do something like a document management system in it, where you would want to have a table of authors recipients and other persons associated with documents in a relational sense. The hope was that you could use a notes database to represent the rich document stuff, which it could kinda do, but also, have some sort of a relational, at least more strongly typed nested collection representation with it and you simply couldn't.
You would want a nested list of authors to be well, authors, of a first name and a last name and other useful information on them, and the same with recipients, cc's, and so on. From there you could build a timeline of who saw what and wrote what correspondence about what topic and that would give you the facts of the case as a simple select. But you couldn't do that, and, at the time, Notes even had problems with just nesting tuples, period. So yeah, Notes database sucked.
And the Notes idea wasn't even novel. The idea of a Notes database being a packed record, indeed, the whole JSON concept of rich data stuffed into a database, was tried before Notes, before XML, way long ago using a system IBM developed called "PICK". PICK was an interesting hybrid in that you could stuff rich data into a field but you could also use a forerunner of a SELECT command, called LIST, to fish stuff out of it.
This is my sig.
And, of course, Notes ran best on the OS/2 server platform. :)
I should know. I WAS a Lotus Notes admin/developer/E-mail admin until '03. Boy, did I pick the wrong horse! The malfunctioning Domino Web server, which would render only some of the Native Notes elements requiring me to create parallel HTML/XML code for every single database form, the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
Some of us would like to see IBM "open source" other stuff, like OS, VSE, VM. Heck, they can keep the source, just give us a hobby, or a "not for profit" license...
And they can keep the current stuff, the stuff they make money on today - like z and ESA. I'ld be more than happy if I could run something like the 20+ year old VSE/SP on my PC at home, under Hercules...
But no, we're stuck with 40 year old "public domain" software, stuff like DOS 26.2 from the System/360 days. Hey, it was fun, I was the "Sysgen Kid" back then. But it only remotely relates to what an, even 20 year old mainframe, is all about today, stuff like CICS...
CICS is a perfect example. Back in the 1.x days, you had 100% of the CICS source code, as long as you had a license. Today "transactiuon server" is a big secret...
Sorry for the OT rant, but it ticks me off. IBM has dumped billions into Linux, but us old greybeards, those of us that wrote those countless lines of Assembly and COBOL and RPG, and yes, CICS code, custom code, without which IBM would have a great OS and nothing else. Those of us that worked shift after shift of unpaid OT, tweaking that demo, making it perfect for the guy that will be spending the IT budget. Those of us that helped make IBM what it is. Those of us that truly enjoy what we do, as a job and hobby...
We can't play with our toys at home, legally that is...
I'm going to retire in a few years. I won't be a licensed user any longer. And I surely can't afford the 4 figure monthly "commercial" software license fee, let alone the 6 figures to "buy" it...
Come on IBM, great "open source" promoter that you have become lately. Do it for us original geeks, we need something to do in our old age...
Open source this - VSE/SP 3.1
the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
The Domino Web Access client was one of the very first commercial AJAX implementations and didn't use any Java whatsoever. It came out in 2001 with release 5.0.8, and could be implemented by applying a new template to your mail -- a process that could be performed by a competent administrator in about 15 seconds across an entire server.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
False. The native language to Lotus Notes is C, and there is a comprehensive C API that has been made available since version 1. The original end-user programming language was @formulas, and was styled after the 1-2-3 formula language back in 1989. In 2002, IBM released Notes/Domino version 6, which included a comprehensive rewrite of the @formula engine to dramatically improve performance and flexibility. It also added looping constructs.
However, it's not like you couldn't do loops before. Notes 4 came out in 1994, and included Lotusscript -- a VB-like scripting language, which provided a sophisticated class model and extensive OOP capabilities. Lotusscript remains the dominant language in Notes/Domino development worldwide (though many devs on the platform are moving to Java & Javascript with the latest versions.)
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Wow. Sounds like you kept top-notch entity relationship diagrams.
If you were running a MySQL database on the backend, would you know every single application in your environment that queried every table? Would that be MySQL's fault?
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
Yeah, let's kill a platform because zildgulf doesn't know how to write and document a computer program. So it must be bad!