JFS on AIX has certainly been around for awhile, but it was not without problems or limitations. JFS2 is really what people use on AIX these days, and is generally a good feature-rich filesystem. But between the LVM bugs and JFS2 bugs I've encountered over the last couple years AIX is not nearly as reliable as I would have hoped. One of the more problematic features with JFS2 was the dynamic resizing, as there was a lovely bug where the resize would hang, which in turn hung all I/O to that filesystem. The only option at that point was a reboot. Needless to say, we were forced to do all resizes offline for a while (even after we'd applied the patches to fix the issue, as we simply couldn't take the chance of it happening again).
I think that we're overlooking the point that there are different categories of Linux desktop users. The perceived lack of an 'email application' may indeed be hindering adoption in the workplace, but I would wager that it is not a problem for home users. This is because I think many home users would be perfectly happy with Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, etc. But as others have hit upon, most home users don't care nearly as much about "groupware" features like an integrated calendar, they just want POP/IMAP support. And frankly, I've found KMail to be outstanding for purely email use. It integrates with the KDE tools for GPG, so I can let it cache my passphrase for a period of time.
Which gets me to my second point, regarding the comment about webmail being the future. Perhaps I'm paranoid about security, but I like to encrypt a good portion of my email and I would really prefer not to store my private key on a server someone else controls. Maybe someone can come up with a solution that uses javascript or a plugin to the browser to decrypt the email in my browser instead of having the webmail server do it, but until that time, I'll hang on to my current setup.
Now, when corporate users talk about 'email' it usually means something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook (at least, in my experience at larger companies). I've run a Linux desktop in these situations before, and it is difficult to integrate with those. Yes, you can make Notes run under Wine, but as I understand it there are required DLL files from MS that means it is legally questionable, and really not the solution anyone wants long term.
Obviously the point the article is making is the need for a full application stack to replace these fairly entrenched proprietary solutions. It would be hugely helpful if IBM would release a Linux Lotus Notes client. Even though it wouldn't be an Open Source application, it would remove a hurdle for Linux on the desktop. At least their server pieces run on several different platforms already.
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JFS on AIX has certainly been around for awhile, but it was not without problems or limitations. JFS2 is really what people use on AIX these days, and is generally a good feature-rich filesystem. But between the LVM bugs and JFS2 bugs I've encountered over the last couple years AIX is not nearly as reliable as I would have hoped. One of the more problematic features with JFS2 was the dynamic resizing, as there was a lovely bug where the resize would hang, which in turn hung all I/O to that filesystem. The only option at that point was a reboot. Needless to say, we were forced to do all resizes offline for a while (even after we'd applied the patches to fix the issue, as we simply couldn't take the chance of it happening again).
Which gets me to my second point, regarding the comment about webmail being the future. Perhaps I'm paranoid about security, but I like to encrypt a good portion of my email and I would really prefer not to store my private key on a server someone else controls. Maybe someone can come up with a solution that uses javascript or a plugin to the browser to decrypt the email in my browser instead of having the webmail server do it, but until that time, I'll hang on to my current setup.
Now, when corporate users talk about 'email' it usually means something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook (at least, in my experience at larger companies). I've run a Linux desktop in these situations before, and it is difficult to integrate with those. Yes, you can make Notes run under Wine, but as I understand it there are required DLL files from MS that means it is legally questionable, and really not the solution anyone wants long term. Obviously the point the article is making is the need for a full application stack to replace these fairly entrenched proprietary solutions. It would be hugely helpful if IBM would release a Linux Lotus Notes client. Even though it wouldn't be an Open Source application, it would remove a hurdle for Linux on the desktop. At least their server pieces run on several different platforms already.