Re: [tlug] On Debian (Forget what I said in the previous mail)

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 07:28:11AM +0100, patrick.niessen@example.com wrote:

>The Problem with this KDE based approach is that you still companies and
>organisations to make the sudden "risky" jump to a completely new platform,
>ie. from Windows to Linux.  I think what we rather need is a step by step
>approach

Further down in my post, I indeed stated that some glue code would be
needed to provide KDE->Exchange and Windows->Kolab cross-functionality
during a transition period for any company.  Granted, if they don't
want to make the transition, there's nothing stopping them from
just using the glue to avoid needing an expensive Exchange license (or
several).

This glue may be unlikely to emerge from the FLOSS community, however,
because:

A) It's not easy to write, and MS doesn't make it easier by publishing an
open spec for Exchange; thus, the number of people who can do it is
limited;

B) Among those people, the number who would want to is probably far more
limited.  Kolab itself was motivated by government funding (Munich??),
which hired in a company to write the thing and open-source it.  Not
many FLOSS developers, especially those who are doing it as a labor
of love (which is almost all of them) feel much like writing code that
runs on, or works with, Windows.  Granted, this glue application could
run on the Kolab server and pretend to be Exchange, but still, it will
be hard, requiring excellent knowledge of both Win32 and Linux programming,
as well as some reverse engineering of a moving target.

>Case in question is scheduling:  Why can we not yet get any decent O/S
>product which can address the main enterprise needs: Meeting Scheduling,
>Free/Busy information available through network, Resource Planning (Meeting
>Rooms).  Exchange also provides "Public Folders" which are used to

Well, Lotus Notes runs on Linux.  Oh, wait, you said "decent" :-)
Still, I'd rather have Notes than Exchange, I think.  Just don't
force me to use it as my SMTP gateway.

>Because most Linux hackers do not need those enterprise features they do not
>develop them.

Precisely.  That's why it took a government project to get Kolab done.

On the other hand, MySQL and (moreso) PostgreSQL have lots of enterprise
features, as do Mozilla and Konqueror.  So does OpenOffice.org, although
it originally grew from a proprietary codebase (so did Mozilla in large 
part, but it's come a long way since then) and Gnome and KDE themselves
have lots of enterprise features, as does the Linux kernel.  Indeed,
a good case could be made that those last three have more enterprise
features than Windows does, having been designed from the ground up 
for networked computing.  Things like Windows Terminal Server were
afterthoughts grafted onto the platform.

Jonathan
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