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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/
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?
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.
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!