Oracle and Mozilla Foundation Work Quietly Together 167
KenDaMan writes "CNet is running a story about the ties between Oracle and the Mozilla Foundation. Oracle hired three people to work on Mozilla Lightning. This project, which aims to integrate Mozilla's calendar application, Sunbird, with its e-mail application, Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook. Is Oracle getting set make an Open Source offering?"
Quietly... (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah. A running news story on at least two large news sites. Pretty good job keeping the lid on this one, Oracle and Moz!
Only 3 people (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Quietly... (Score:1)
what about Novell? (Score:1)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:1)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:1)
fully functional Groupware client like Evolution
is. Evolution has a built in calendar and it can
auto-sync with Exchange and any *Nix e-mail
server.
As a side note I'm having a hard time
understanding why ClamAV/Win + Thunderbird
hasn't created a pop3/smtp hook like it (ClamWin)
has for Outlook yet. I'd much rather recommend
ClamWin to newbie's instead of AVG but until
they get e-mail support for Thunderbird I can't
change my recommendation since I'm pushing
Firebird
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
I'm also confused why y
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
"XULie you old nut" (Score:2)
Re:"XULie you old nut" (Score:2)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
XUL Runner (Score:2)
From what I gather, an upcoming goal for Firefox development is to package all the back-end engine stuff into a "XUL Runner" runtime platform that could be installed separate from any one application. Firefox itself would then be just a ~1MB bundle of XUL code, chrome, etc., and Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other apps could be equally lightweight.
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
Tell me how I can have it delete files off the server when deleted locally. I dont see the option. It appears to be removed but it doesnt.
Thunderbird can do that and is easily configured.
Re:what about Novell? (Score:2)
Evolution - unstable, Thunderbird - no real SMTP (Score:2)
Evolution is a wonderfully crafted client, with great UI, but it crashes way too often to be treated seriously. Few days ago i added new account, and didn't noticed that my email provider require SMTP atuthentification. With that option unmarked Evolution crashed whenever i tried to send an email. Bad.
Thunderbird is no better - way it handles multiple accounts (and who doesn't have many accounts?) and SMTP's is unacceptable and really hard
Ok, someone explain this to me... (Score:2)
2) Break Mozilla suite apart, creating projects like Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird
3) Merge pieces back together again
Does anyone else think this is kind of weird?
Re:Ok, someone explain this to me... (Score:2)
Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's a bragart, and if Lightning delivers what Firefox has, you can be sure he'll be publicly thumbing his nose at Gates.
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
And the problem with this is exactly what?
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps I should have posted the links above in my original comment.
Re:Well.. (Score:1)
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
I'm not saying they do everything because of their dislike for each other. But this, to me, reeks of it.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why you think it doesn't?
Oracle is any "better" than M$? (Score:2)
Oracle's Alternatives (Score:2)
Circa 1999-2001, CTS was really the only full-blown UNIX-based replacement for Exchange available: you installed a client-side plugin in Outlook 2000, and it made the CTS calendar server plus any conforming IMAP server look like an Exchange server to Outlook. It was neat, but a little flaky on t
Testing the Waters (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Testing the Waters (Score:2)
Ok maybe open source (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ok maybe open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ok maybe open source (Score:1, Informative)
Basically if it was easy to make a 2-Tier Groupware application using just Mozilla and Postgres, we'd have one already.
Re:Ok maybe open source (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect the point of this project is to implement the middleware that is needed to allow collaboration between multiple calendar users. As long as everything written on top of the SQL/LDAP interface is open source, then small organizations could drop in something like postgres, while larger organizations would probably want
Re:Ok maybe open source (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ok maybe open source (Score:2)
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Is Oracle getting set make an Open Source offering?
I dunno. Is Slashdot getting set make good English on the Editor?
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:2)
Maybe they are setting up us the bomb [planettribes.com] instead
benefit (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear god no... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't make Thunderbird any more bloated than it alread is. Why must a calendar be integrated with e-mail anyways?
Had you read the Mozilla Lightning [mozilla.org] link, you would have seen that this is a "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality." A Thunderbird extension. (That said, I could see this eventually being an optional component included with the installer so that it's more Outlook-like and doesn't require users to go somewhere to download it, assuming they even know about it in the first place.)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:1)
Keep what yah need, trim the rest. And if you want to develop something for it, have at it!
Re:Dear god no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's great to get an invitation via email, which you can add to your calendar with one click, rather than re-entering the info?
Because I leave my email program running all the time, and I'd rather not have to leave another calendar program running as well?
Because both email and calendars have a pretty integral relation to a to-do list, and it's nice not to have to keep track of 2 lists, or do the whole copy-paste thing from one to the other. I just click on an email, mark it for follow-up by X date, and it's in my to-do list. Same with stuff I need to get done before an appointment.
Re:Dear god no... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:2)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:4, Informative)
Rest of the program was shit, though.
Re:Dear god no... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dear god no..., you mean yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dear god no..., you mean yes (Score:2)
Seriously.. I have been having a hard time getting different cell phones to sync to calendars.. I have a Nokia 3300 which has a option for calendar sync. It can sync over the internet. I just have to type in the url of the server and it will do it.. Problem is there is no documentation and I have no idea what type of server etc to point it to.. or what type of server I must buy in order to set one up...
any help?
Re:Dear god no..., you mean yes (Score:2)
Re:Dear god no... (Score:4, Informative)
As in, cost saving for planning and secretary work.
Please gimme it in firefox with thunderbird connected to a choice of webservers, a choice of Db's and I'll be rolling this out pronto.
Heck, I could start a business around it.
Re:Dear god no... (Score:2)
please tie in Samba, LDAP/Kerb auth, en a few decent IMAP's, Cyrus, comes to mind.
Re:Dear god no... (Score:2)
When you eventually get a job (Score:2, Insightful)
MozillaZine is running a story, too (Score:5, Informative)
MozillaZine is running a story, too, and it's probably a little more truthful...
ZDNet Tries to Get to the Bottom of the Oracle-Mozilla Relationship [mozillazine.org]
Not Anymore (Score:1, Funny)
Apparently not anymore.. Slashdot knows!!!
The real challenge (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as you can free companies from the Exchange lock in and offer a better alternative then you have a chance.
Most people for example love OpenOffice, but won't switch, since they also need Outlook which is connected to the data on the Exchange server.
No Exchange server - no underlaying windows server. No Outlook - no Microsoft Office.
So what's needed is a strong Thunderbird for Office slaves and an Exchange replacement - plus total data import.
Re:The real challenge (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that our Oracle-based electronic medical records application will only support Outlook for sending secure e-mails. I would love to put Mozilla everywhere, but instead I had to buy Outlook licenses. It's downright painful.
Anything that makes Mozilla easier for the EMR app's developers to support is a good idea in my book. If Oracle likes Moz, that'll help me convince the EMR vendor that it's worthy of their support too.
Re:The real challenge (Score:2)
Re:The real challenge (Score:1, Interesting)
The only thing that's ever sold Exchange is the Outlook client and the good integration with MS Office (plus the MS brandname). If Lotus wasn't so fugly and locked into "SmartSuite", they would still own the groupware market.
Re:The real challenge (Score:2)
I use neither.
Re:The real challenge (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real challenge (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The real challenge (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php [k5n.us]
Thunderbird - disconnected IMAP & postfix & squirel mail.
They had to trust me at first.....but now my company will never look back - Oh and ban outlook unless they absolutly have to use it, like the accountant, who emails directly from MYOB - ie MAPI - then just configure outlook express to send email, but only open Thunderbird to read the reply.
We do keep a windows PDC for central authentication, look at winbind from the samba install - a daemon that y
Re:The real challenge (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you have it backwards. The lock-in is with Outlook, not Exchange. Nobody cares what's running in the server room and Outlook generally plays well with other vendors' server offerings. The sticking point is having to retrain everyone to use a different application for email, calendar, discussions, collaboration etc (not to mention syncing with all manner of handheld devices).
Re:The real challenge (Score:2)
A seamless alternative to Exchange is needed to open the corporate market.
I think seamless interoperability with M$ Word cannot be underestimated. Every anecdotal account I hear of pioneers trying linux and going back almost always involves a story of end user complaints about trying to open MS Word files.
Oracle sells Email Servers too (Score:3, Insightful)
If Open-Sourcers had a strategy department, they'd make Mozilla Calendar the most important product they have to ship, far more important than Firefox. Unfortunately (or fortunately for IBM/MS) things don't quite work that way.
Oracle Open Source? - No (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
Oracle offers a product that aims to compete head to head with Microsoft's suite of collaboration products.
One of my former clients was looking to use this software in their enterprise, which, at the time, was using mostly Microsoft products on this front. My impression of the matter was the that the only reason that they were even considering this was because they had a site license for Oracle's database, development, and web services products, and had on-site consultants offering solutions to them.
IE, Oracle certainly had their ear already.
Oracle probably views Thunderbird as a way to break Microsoft's hold on this sector of the market. By restoring some competition on this front, they could market their products more effectively.
Other FOSS projects... (Score:1, Informative)
As far as the collaboration suite goes, there is a work on a plugin for Thunderbird to integrate the Oracle Calendar system and I am sure there are other efforts I am not aware of.
This level o
Another secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not secret anymore. With the release of Solaris 10 as free, is it any wonder that Oracle would look at opening its market share a bit with a similar move.
I think the real news here is that F/OSS is having an effect on the software industry. I believe that effect is a good one. Solaris 10 might not be the best thing I've ever seen, its a start. Oracle working in their domain space to open up things like CRM, SAP, and other areas is a damn good thing. If they can produce something that opens these and other markets to F/OSS then the competition gets tougher and more wide spread.
The opening of Microsoft dominated markets is nothing but good news. Any weakening of their grip on the software industry in any domain opens up that market so even proprietary vendors have a shot at it.
This move doesn't surprise me at all, in fact, I believe that we will see much more of this. It costs very little in terms of lock-in and other long term financial factors to work with F/OSS to open up a market that is practically locked down by a single vendor, whether that vendor is Microsoft or not.
A long time ago, it was said that you could never get fired for buying big blue. That kind of reputation is one that Microsoft never achieved. The software industry began changing so fast that it never could get that reputation, but the fallout of the fast paced changes is that if you have a reputation of great support and super value for money you will end up with market share. This is still in the process of becomming a defacto standard.
As F/OSS products become more technically and financially strong, it is in the best interests of any software vendor to work with those products, even promote and support them.
A product or two that runs on an Oracle backend product and directly competes with Microsoft etc. is a good thing... it opens up the market to more competition. If it will run on Oracle, it can probably run on mySQL etc. What options it ends up with is of little concern if it takes market share from the dominant player in that market.
Since people with little budgets are not Oracles main revenue stream, these new products would directly mangle revenue streams of Microsoft and make Oracle the version that you would use if you had to scale to large size operations.
It just makes sense.
Mobile support (Score:2)
Re:Mobile support (Score:2)
I have seen lots of desktop sync's.. but server sync is the real solution. And it is the only long term solution. The problem is that I haven't seen any good services which will sync these over the internet.. They all currently need desktop sync as a go-between
Exchange Killers (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, I'd love to see people take the Mozilla/Oracle code for improving Fire/Thunderbird, and improve their integration with O-X. That kind of cross-pollination is perfect for OSS, and leaves proprietary competition, like MS Exchange, standing behind like a stick in the mud.
Re:Exchange Killers (Score:2)
Actually, it's the core of Novell SUSE OpenExchange Server. GroupWise is a closed-source application.
-m
Re:Exchange Killers (Score:2)
Also, Scalix costs $60:client, while O-X is free for all functions (except for its Outlook plugin, which is about to be released, but as yet unpriced). For Web, Evolut
Don't think so (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt that. What makes Microsoft LookOut so appealing to big business, or even small business for that matter, is not that it's a great email client - it's the intergration with MS Exchange. Shared contact list, scheduling, folders, all from a central location. Is there a Mozilla server in the works?
You can have shared address books using LDAP but can you modify those contacts directly from the email client? Until that can happen lets not get too excited.
Re:Don't think so (Score:2)
I doubt that. What makes Microsoft LookOut so appealing to big business, or even small business for that matter, is not that it's a great email client - it's the intergration with MS Exchange. Shared contact list, scheduling, folders, all from a central location. Is there a Mozilla server in the works?
Hmm...maybe that's why Oracle is involved? I hear they're pretty good at writing servers...
Re:Don't think so (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't think so (Score:2)
Re:Don't think so (Score:2)
Exchange Killer? (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle already bought out Steltor's CorporateTime, which was an Exchange Killer, and then buried it in proprietary bullshit. I've since moved over to Exchange4Linux [exchange4linux.com], which, barring the poor name, I feel really is an Exchange Killer.
Basically the entire thing runs inside of Postfix and PostgreSQL. It's written in Python, and the server software is 100% open source. The Outlook Connector is not (it too is written in Python). So far it's been working great (huge datastore, calendaring, delegation, it all works). Basically N-H went about it differently than all the others: instead of making Outlook wrap around open services, they made the open services conform to Microsoft's bastardized MAPI. I have to say this has owrked better than anything else I've found.
Re:Exchange Killer? (Score:2)
I've commented in the past on the limitations of Sunbird, so I won't rehash that here.
I still can't
Using open source against your competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Using open source against your competitors (Score:2)
I read that as... (Score:2, Interesting)
Will it do contacts management? (Score:3, Interesting)
-You can't print 20 to a page
-you don't have the same number of fields.
-phone numbers to auto re-format themselves when you type them in.
-etc.
If this was fixed, I would jump in a heart beat.
Re:Will it do contacts management? (Score:2)
I agree that those features are great -- and its one of the few reasons I've ever liked Outlook (contact management), but incorporating those features into Thunderbird or Sunbird makes no sense.
That should be the job of a dedicated piece of software and it should have nice public interfaces for software like Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything else needing to know about people to interface with.
Re:Will it do contacts management? (Score:2)
I can see you now setting up a meeting:
-Ok I got everybody, Send
-D'oh! I used john's old email. The updated one is in the contact manager Prog!
-Gotta sync them up aging...
Granted the opposite would probably happen more often but I think I made my point.
Maybe it could be an extension but I don't see how given the amount of integration required to make things work
Re:Will it do contacts management? (Score:2)
What's the difference between clicking the "Contacts" icon in Outlook or launching a Contacts application?
None, well, its in a new window (how I'd prefer my contacts).
What's the difference if the secondary contacts program has CORBA support and is accessible from within my mail software (for adding new names, looking up names), etc.? None.
I'm a programmer; I think like one.
I've used E-mail since 1989 and have tens of thousands of direct contacts. It matters to me.
Finally, a Lotus replacement (Score:2)
If Lotus wont deliver, maybe Sunbird+Thunderbird will. Another issue are the custom apps of Domino, I guess we'll just have to do without them. I wonder how well a Sunbird+Thunderbird combination will work as clients to Domino 7 running on a Linux machine.
Re:Finally, a Lotus replacement (Score:2)
Sean
Great! (Score:2)
I'm not an OSS fan, but if you believe that OSS is the future, why delay the transition by propping up the old guard because they throw you a few crumbs?
Holy moley.. good news! (Score:2)
I'm now very interested to see what they're going to come out with. This could make huge inroads in the small business community, where sadly Exchange (thanks to Windows Small Business Server 2003) has been gaining ground..
Here's what oracle needs to do... (Score:2)
Oracle's current work on Mozilla Lightning (Thunderbird Mail + Sunbird Calendar ++) should be interesting. Thunderbird is already a fairly decent mail client. Its main flaws from a large company perspective are its lack of calendaring and administration tools (pushing updates, profiles etc). If Oracle can fix these flaws and tie it to the Oracle database backend they should have a product they can sell.
What Oracle will need to do:
1) Fix the flaws and make it "good enough" for most business
Which Bill? Oh, *that* one ... (Score:1)
Re:KDE's PIM already does this (Score:2)
Re:Firefox to read Open Document Format (Score:2)
(Think before you respond!)
OK...
A new word or concept?
:)