Disclaimer: this is something that I originally wrote on a BBS. So it's appropriate but not an "original for today."
The BBS never really died. Thats a myth perpetrated by Slashdot (if ever there were a central repository for groupthink, Slashdot is it) as well as self-proclaimed pundits in the tech trade rags who are always waxing eloquent about the "next big thing." Sure – the Internet did change the world, and it continues to do so. But when it comes to people interacting with each other online, that process began when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put their first system online in 1978, and it has continued uninterrupted since then. It moved from dialup to the Internet.
Today, various developers are finding new and innovative ways to optimize their messaging platforms for different audiences. For example, millions of American teenagers are now BBS users: they are all subscribed to a large BBS called MySpace. Responses to this assertion which begin with the words "But MySpace isnt a BBS, its a" will be summarily ignored because they indicate that you havent given more than ten seconds of thought to the subject. Forums, chat, email doesnt all of this sound more than a little bit familiar? Even the "BBSs are from yesteryear" groupthink over at Slashdot is particularly ironic, considering that Slashdot itself is basically just a big BBS optimized for the reporting and discussion of tech news.
You can call it a BBS, or you can call it groupware, or you can call it "social software" (the new favorite buzzword for the tech marketing dweebs). Call it whatever you want but its basically the same thing. Messaging is messaging. Its just a question of how you optimize it for your audience.
They'll make great terminals. All you need is a simple boot image to get each one to attach to the network and connect to an Linux Terminal Server.
At that point you've got a nice farm of small terminals with a big powerful server behind them. If you don't need this for yourself, consider donating the whole setup to a local school, church, or other organization that could use a low-maintenance multiuser computing environment.
I was talking about AV other than ClamAV, which doesn't work.
Read: "I failed to stump you so I'm going to just close my eyes and pretend that your answer doesnt' count."
And the Exchange database is standard SQL, you can use anything that talks SQL as a backend.
This is one hundred percent wrong. Microsoft has been talking about SQL-enabled Exchange for years but they haven't delivered it. Exchange still uses the JET database engine, the same one that's bundled with Access. It's the same category of product as Berkeley DB (except Berkeley DB can run for more than five minutes without crashing).
Sorry, if learning anything about Citadel involves installing it in a live environment and running it for months you're going to have a tough sell.
Millions of happy users and thousands of delighted system administrators will disagree with you.
Based on my reading, in order to get the features of Exchange I would have to:
...perform a one-command Easy Install and have a working system up and running in no time.
Why don't you guys have a CD/DVD that will let me install a standalone Citadel server in one shot (operating system, web server, clients, etc.)? *I* could build something like this in a week.
It's available as an appliance. Download it from the web site.
So at this point I've got to ask... how much is Microsoft paying you to make these silly arguments?
It's very easy to see why the GPL is the very best license to choose for a FOSS project. Quite simply, it is the license that Microsoft abhors the most. The very mention of its name sends Microsoft people into foaming fits of anger.
From this, we may safely draw the conclusion that Microsoft has done a lot of research, with a lot of lawyers, and they've determined that the GPL represents the biggest threat to their revenue model. And what's bad for Microsoft is generally good for everyone else. So if you're going to develop FOSS, the GPL is the obvious safe choice.
The fact is, I really haven't run into an organization that DOESN'T want Windows+Exchange. As far s I can tell, it's only the cost that drives anyone away.
This point is summarily dismissed, because we have already established that you are lying about your experience.
Baked into the basic system at the most basic levels. This question implies that you haven't spent more than 30 seconds evaluating it.
How do I use a real database? Where are the automated backup tools?
Berkeley DB supports databases up to 256 TB with hot backup. I can't imagine how you could possibly consider that something other than a "real database." Exchange can't come anywhere near that.
How do I cluster Citadel?
Using the tools built into the base system. It's so easy even an MCSE could do it.
Which Winows desktop clients work absolutely perfectly with Citadel?
Outlook, among others. I know, it sucks, but some people seem to like it.
and most importantly, Where can I hire a consultant that will do all this for me?
Ask on the support forum and a number of people will answer.
What mail protocols do you offer other than POP3 and IMAP? Let's assume for the moment that you rip out these protocols... what exactly can you do with the Citadel system now? I know you have the web client, but does that use HTTP to transfer mail?
There is of course the Web interface, as well as WebDAV support, and there is an application-specific protocol that several clients make use of.
Your questions are ill-researched if you were looking for me to come up empty. You clearly have not spent enough time evaluating either product. And your assertion that people look to non-Exchange products only because some are gratis is extremely naive. With well over a million installed seats of Citadel and system administrators regularly singing its praises, we are confident that we are delivering a groupware system that does more than eliminate Microsoft licensing fees -- it's a new way of doing collaboration that people genuinely like once they've experienced it.
Just outsource it. There are plenty of services that will do the job for you, and they're very affordable, especially compared to the cost of your own time. Postini for example is fantastic; we've been using them since before Google bought the company, and they're quite effective with very few false positives. At about a dollar per mailbox per month, you almost can't afford not to do it.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
In the GPLv2, the language was simpler: "You are not required to accept this license, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission..." It's completely clear. You accept the terms of the GPL as written, or you don't use the code. Period.
Whoever said that the goal is to replace Exchange in the enterprise? If some random enterprise company wants the feature set of Exchange then they probably should be running Exchange. Let them have the headaches of platform lock-in, frequent crashes, high cost of maintenance, etc. And let the Zimbra people waste their time trying to conquer that market.
What we've been saying for a long time is that the Exchange feature set is just plain wrong for most organizations. We're promoting a better way, a more sensible feature set for most users, a workflow that actually encourages collaboration. People who are expecting a feature-for-feature, bug-for-bug Exchange clone are frequently disappointed. On the other hand, people who "get it" tend to become quite attached to it very quickly.
By the way, it would be reckless to claim that Citadel "depends on" IMAP. IMAP is merely one of the many protocols and services it offers. (Compare with most of the other FOSS solutions, and even the FOSS-wannabe solutions like Zimbra and Scalix, who built their entire messaging infrastructures around Cyrus. Yeah, they *depend* on IMAP.)
IMAP is broken, and any mail system that depends on it is doomed (Citadel, for example). The lead IMAP developer for Citadel has told me this personally. I've now heard this from 3 different sets of IMAP developers (Netscape, Sun, and Citadel) and my personal reading of the spec is that it's near-gibberish, but I am not an expert.
You are obviously full of shit, because I *am* the lead IMAP developer for Citadel and I have not ever said any such thing to you or anyone else. What I have said, on many occasions, is that IMAP is, architecturally speaking, a very ugly protocol, and it's a shame that something so inelegant became the standard. But it is the standard.
More importantly, Exchange/MAPI have a robust calendering system that works very well,
...works very well with Outlook. Outlook is not the be-all and end-all of client software. We have to interface with it in order to support legacy clients, but it is not the shining standard of beautiful software to which we all must aspire.
Lest you call bullshit, I'm familiar with the networks of most of the Fortune 1000.
You've already been caught in a lie, so why should we believe that you've ever set foot inside a Fortune 1000 company?
Most (all?) FOSS products that integrate with Outlook are fundamentally broken - they integrate by means of a periodic sync.
Sorry, but you're 180 degrees wrong on this one. Several of the better open source groupware platforms, including Citadel and OpenGroupware, are capable of being used with Outlook connectors that implement a full MAPI store driver, not a flimsy "sync" half-solution.
Zimbra (along with a couple of other "hybrids", such as Scalix) claims not to suffer from this problem - as long as you buy the commercial version.
Once again, 180 degrees wrong. Zimbra's connector is a "sync" program.
You kind of left out a party in your "win-win" analysis. How about customers? I have one very real group of customers in mind--Zimbra customers.
What are the odds Microsoft would have allowed it to flourish? I'm betting that, at a minimum, they would have jacked the price up until it was no longer as cost effective over Exchange.
I'm not so sure that Zimbra is ever going to provide any real value to Yahoo, even without the threat of a Microsoft takeover looming.
Zimbra has effectively painted itself into a corner when it comes to value in terms of cost/benefit. They helped themselves to FOSS underpinnings in order to develop their product quickly, and because of this they are obligated to offer a feature-crippled free version. Because of their well-funded PR department they were able to spin this as "see, we're an open source company" in order to gain some street cred, but anyone who has taken a serious look at Zimbra knows that if you want it to be useful to anything more than the most simplistic of installations, you have to buy the "Network Edition."
This effectively locks them out of the marketplace for true open source solutions such as Citadel and Kolab and eGroupware because they're not true end-to-end FOSS. At the same time, they can't raise their prices high enough to make real money with the product, because customers would just as soon go with Exchange.
Disclaimer: I'm a Citadel developer, and a proponent of end-to-end FOSS solutions rather than weird commercial hybrids such as Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter). But I think there's a lot of weight to what I'm saying here.
Zimbra and Scalix don't count as true FOSS because they are scaled-down crippleware. If you want the full feature set of either one, you have to pay. Insert RMS rant here (this is one of those situations where it's relevant). These two companies went with a (just barely) open source license for two reasons: (1) cheap street cred, and (2) so they could help themselves to existing code without paying for it or developing it in-house.
There is plenty of good messaging/collaboration software out there that is true FOSS and not some bastardized commercial hybrid. Citadel and Kolab come to mind as a few of the most versatile.
The idea that messaging/collaboration is a gap in the Linux stack is a complete myth. There are numerous options available, such as Citadel which is end-to-end GPL code, has all of the most requested groupware functions, and even has an Outlook connector available for those PHB's who aren't ready to leave the old world behind yet. I wish people would stop pushing this idea that Outlook/Exchange can't be matched.
I would pose the following question to slashdot: how has Java being closed source affected you personally, and what effects do you see this having in the future?
For one thing, we won't have to listen to RMS whining about it every time someone mentions the current version of OpenOffice.
Microsoft has tried this before, and the industry already told them "Go away, Microsoft. We don't want HailStorm acting as the official Microsoft Big Brother of our technology lives."
Red Hat does servers well, and they should continue to do so. In my data center we use exclusively Red Hat (and CentOS, which is essentially the same thing). It's solid, it's built for the glass house, and every piece of Linux server software in the known universe supports it.
On our desktops and laptops? Ubuntu all the way. They do the desktop really well and they will continue to do so.
It's this clever strategy we like to call "using the right tool for the job."
I think that most unbiased observers would conclude that Microsoft's main goal in having OOXML rushed through is to allow.govs to tick the box that allows them to keep purchasing Microsoft Office.
That was quite obviously their goal. I think the next move, then, ought to be for the free world to very clearly document exactly where and how Microsoft Office 2007 is not a compliant implementation of ISO OOXML and therefore must be disqualified from any bids that specify its use.
Not to worry... with the Dollar declining in global value, suddenly those foreign workers aren't so cheap anymore. Cheap Chinese-made consumer goods aren't so cheap anymore either. One happy side effect of the falling Dollar is that the USA is actually on its way to being globally competitive again.
If you want to worry about the American workforce being displaced, worry about it being displaced by illegal immigrants, not H1-B's.
If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are "content", but using it as a noun to describe written and other works of authorship is worth avoiding. That usage adopts a specific attitude towards those works: that they are an interchangeable commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it treats the works themselves with disrespect.
Those who use this term are often the publishers that push for increased copyright power in the name of the authors ("creators", as they say) of the works. The term "content" reveals what they really feel. (See Courtney Love's open letter to Steve Case (search for "content provider" in that page. Alas, Ms. Love is unaware that the term "intellectual property" is also misleading.)
However, as long as other people use the term "content provider", political dissidents can well call themselves "malcontent providers".
Because doing anything in Linux ends up with me banging my head against my computer screen. Even Ubuntu, the most user-friendly distro so far, is an endless series of frustrations. "Why can't I just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install?!?!" "What is the difference between KDE and Gnome and why should it matter?!?!" "Why do I have to go to the command line interface to do even basic stuff?" Hell, until the latest release, Ubuntu wouldn't even let me attach a projector without a complicated edit to the Xorg config file. ARGHHHHH!!!
Uh, dude, 1998 called and they want their argument back.
Apple's development tools continue to generate binaries that support both Intel and PowerPC, and they continue to support the operating system on both architectures, so why not? Yes, I know, there's a difference between POWER and PowerPC, but it's not a big difference -- after all, you run the same version of Linux on an IBM pSeries that you do on a Power Mac.
Apple would have buying leverage against both IBM and Intel by being able to shift portions of their manufacturing from one architecture to another with each model. And they'd have access to some of the fastest processors on earth. Can you imagine one of these things powering Photoshop, or even rendering the next Pixar movie?
Our employees are hooked on Outlook, journals especially (I loathe them, space
eating buggers) so we keep exchange chugging along and a couple of domain
controllers.
You should check out Citadel. Open source, does most of the things Exchange does (plus a few things Exchange doesn't do), plus there's an Outlook connector available.
Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.
I like this, but I can tell you already where the problem is going to be: the electric companies. Not the ESCO's, mind you (because in this plan, basically everyone becomes an ESCO to some degree) but the incumbent power companies.
You'll recall that when ESCO's first went online, your friendly neighborhood incumbent power company shifted most of your bill towards paying for the distribution of electricity rather than the generation of electricity. Supposedly half of your electric bill now goes towards maintaining the physical plant (which is bullshit, of course, as anyone who's seen the state of disrepair the grid is currently in).
So when everyone is backfeeding into the grid, sure, you'll be paid for the electricity itself, but it'll be a fraction of the per-kilowatt hour you're paying in the other direction, because they'll only pay you for the "generation" portion. Or it might even be worse -- they might pay you for the electricity but then charge you for the service of providing the grid that you're backfeeding into.
Never underestimate the power of an incumbent bigco protecting its monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
But as a condolence, Microsoft gave both of them Barnes & Noble gift certificates so they could keep reading.
Disclaimer: this is something that I originally wrote on a BBS. So it's appropriate but not an "original for today."
The BBS never really died. Thats a myth perpetrated by Slashdot (if ever there were a central repository for groupthink, Slashdot is it) as well as self-proclaimed pundits in the tech trade rags who are always waxing eloquent about the "next big thing." Sure – the Internet did change the world, and it continues to do so. But when it comes to people interacting with each other online, that process began when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put their first system online in 1978, and it has continued uninterrupted since then. It moved from dialup to the Internet.
Today, various developers are finding new and innovative ways to optimize their messaging platforms for different audiences. For example, millions of American teenagers are now BBS users: they are all subscribed to a large BBS called MySpace. Responses to this assertion which begin with the words "But MySpace isnt a BBS, its a" will be summarily ignored because they indicate that you havent given more than ten seconds of thought to the subject. Forums, chat, email doesnt all of this sound more than a little bit familiar? Even the "BBSs are from yesteryear" groupthink over at Slashdot is particularly ironic, considering that Slashdot itself is basically just a big BBS optimized for the reporting and discussion of tech news.
You can call it a BBS, or you can call it groupware, or you can call it "social software" (the new favorite buzzword for the tech marketing dweebs). Call it whatever you want but its basically the same thing. Messaging is messaging. Its just a question of how you optimize it for your audience.
They'll make great terminals. All you need is a simple boot image to get each one to attach to the network and connect to an Linux Terminal Server.
At that point you've got a nice farm of small terminals with a big powerful server behind them. If you don't need this for yourself, consider donating the whole setup to a local school, church, or other organization that could use a low-maintenance multiuser computing environment.
So at this point I've got to ask
It's very easy to see why the GPL is the very best license to choose for a FOSS project. Quite simply, it is the license that Microsoft abhors the most. The very mention of its name sends Microsoft people into foaming fits of anger.
From this, we may safely draw the conclusion that Microsoft has done a lot of research, with a lot of lawyers, and they've determined that the GPL represents the biggest threat to their revenue model. And what's bad for Microsoft is generally good for everyone else. So if you're going to develop FOSS, the GPL is the obvious safe choice.
Your questions are ill-researched if you were looking for me to come up empty. You clearly have not spent enough time evaluating either product. And your assertion that people look to non-Exchange products only because some are gratis is extremely naive. With well over a million installed seats of Citadel and system administrators regularly singing its praises, we are confident that we are delivering a groupware system that does more than eliminate Microsoft licensing fees -- it's a new way of doing collaboration that people genuinely like once they've experienced it.
Just outsource it. There are plenty of services that will do the job for you, and they're very affordable, especially compared to the cost of your own time. Postini for example is fantastic; we've been using them since before Google bought the company, and they're quite effective with very few false positives. At about a dollar per mailbox per month, you almost can't afford not to do it.
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
In the GPLv2, the language was simpler: "You are not required to accept this license, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission..." It's completely clear. You accept the terms of the GPL as written, or you don't use the code. Period.
Whoever said that the goal is to replace Exchange in the enterprise? If some random enterprise company wants the feature set of Exchange then they probably should be running Exchange. Let them have the headaches of platform lock-in, frequent crashes, high cost of maintenance, etc. And let the Zimbra people waste their time trying to conquer that market.
What we've been saying for a long time is that the Exchange feature set is just plain wrong for most organizations. We're promoting a better way, a more sensible feature set for most users, a workflow that actually encourages collaboration. People who are expecting a feature-for-feature, bug-for-bug Exchange clone are frequently disappointed. On the other hand, people who "get it" tend to become quite attached to it very quickly.
By the way, it would be reckless to claim that Citadel "depends on" IMAP. IMAP is merely one of the many protocols and services it offers. (Compare with most of the other FOSS solutions, and even the FOSS-wannabe solutions like Zimbra and Scalix, who built their entire messaging infrastructures around Cyrus. Yeah, they *depend* on IMAP.)
Zimbra has effectively painted itself into a corner when it comes to value in terms of cost/benefit. They helped themselves to FOSS underpinnings in order to develop their product quickly, and because of this they are obligated to offer a feature-crippled free version. Because of their well-funded PR department they were able to spin this as "see, we're an open source company" in order to gain some street cred, but anyone who has taken a serious look at Zimbra knows that if you want it to be useful to anything more than the most simplistic of installations, you have to buy the "Network Edition."
This effectively locks them out of the marketplace for true open source solutions such as Citadel and Kolab and eGroupware because they're not true end-to-end FOSS. At the same time, they can't raise their prices high enough to make real money with the product, because customers would just as soon go with Exchange.
Disclaimer: I'm a Citadel developer, and a proponent of end-to-end FOSS solutions rather than weird commercial hybrids such as Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter). But I think there's a lot of weight to what I'm saying here.
Zimbra and Scalix don't count as true FOSS because they are scaled-down crippleware. If you want the full feature set of either one, you have to pay. Insert RMS rant here (this is one of those situations where it's relevant). These two companies went with a (just barely) open source license for two reasons: (1) cheap street cred, and (2) so they could help themselves to existing code without paying for it or developing it in-house.
There is plenty of good messaging/collaboration software out there that is true FOSS and not some bastardized commercial hybrid. Citadel and Kolab come to mind as a few of the most versatile.
The idea that messaging/collaboration is a gap in the Linux stack is a complete myth. There are numerous options available, such as Citadel which is end-to-end GPL code, has all of the most requested groupware functions, and even has an Outlook connector available for those PHB's who aren't ready to leave the old world behind yet. I wish people would stop pushing this idea that Outlook/Exchange can't be matched.
Microsoft has tried this before, and the industry already told them "Go away, Microsoft. We don't want HailStorm acting as the official Microsoft Big Brother of our technology lives."
Red Hat does servers well, and they should continue to do so. In my data center we use exclusively Red Hat (and CentOS, which is essentially the same thing). It's solid, it's built for the glass house, and every piece of Linux server software in the known universe supports it.
On our desktops and laptops? Ubuntu all the way. They do the desktop really well and they will continue to do so.
It's this clever strategy we like to call "using the right tool for the job."
Not to worry ... with the Dollar declining in global value, suddenly those foreign workers aren't so cheap anymore. Cheap Chinese-made consumer goods aren't so cheap anymore either. One happy side effect of the falling Dollar is that the USA is actually on its way to being globally competitive again.
If you want to worry about the American workforce being displaced, worry about it being displaced by illegal immigrants, not H1-B's.
If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are "content", but using it as a noun to describe written and other works of authorship is worth avoiding. That usage adopts a specific attitude towards those works: that they are an interchangeable commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it treats the works themselves with disrespect.
Those who use this term are often the publishers that push for increased copyright power in the name of the authors ("creators", as they say) of the works. The term "content" reveals what they really feel. (See Courtney Love's open letter to Steve Case (search for "content provider" in that page. Alas, Ms. Love is unaware that the term "intellectual property" is also misleading.)
However, as long as other people use the term "content provider", political dissidents can well call themselves "malcontent providers".
Apple's development tools continue to generate binaries that support both Intel and PowerPC, and they continue to support the operating system on both architectures, so why not? Yes, I know, there's a difference between POWER and PowerPC, but it's not a big difference -- after all, you run the same version of Linux on an IBM pSeries that you do on a Power Mac.
Apple would have buying leverage against both IBM and Intel by being able to shift portions of their manufacturing from one architecture to another with each model. And they'd have access to some of the fastest processors on earth. Can you imagine one of these things powering Photoshop, or even rendering the next Pixar movie?
You'll recall that when ESCO's first went online, your friendly neighborhood incumbent power company shifted most of your bill towards paying for the distribution of electricity rather than the generation of electricity. Supposedly half of your electric bill now goes towards maintaining the physical plant (which is bullshit, of course, as anyone who's seen the state of disrepair the grid is currently in).
So when everyone is backfeeding into the grid, sure, you'll be paid for the electricity itself, but it'll be a fraction of the per-kilowatt hour you're paying in the other direction, because they'll only pay you for the "generation" portion. Or it might even be worse -- they might pay you for the electricity but then charge you for the service of providing the grid that you're backfeeding into.
Never underestimate the power of an incumbent bigco protecting its monopoly.