Oracle and Mozilla Foundation Work Quietly Together

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?"

MozillaZine is running a story, too

[R.Mo_Robert]

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]

Re:Dear god no...

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.)

Other FOSS projects...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle also has a fair sized group working on the Linux kernel and some people working on problems with RedHat, SuSE and Asianux related to clustering, performance and other aspects important for the database being running smoothly on these systems. You can get a lot of information on the OTN about these projects.

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 of involvement is nothing unusual. Oracle has always had projects aimed at improvement of software that we use or that runs together with our systems. Its just that with FOSS projects its much easier to get access to the source code and do these changes without a horde of lawyers having to sort things out first with the other company or vendor.

Re:Dear god no...

[Xoder]

Its for office automation. I used to use Outlook at work, and the one awesome feature was that my boss could just send me appointments, and I could accept them into my schedule.

Rest of the program was shit, though.

Re:Dear god no...

[Chess_the_cat]

I can think of at least one other. When you want to create a new meeting you can have Outlook autopick the best time for everyone on your invite list based on their calendars.

Re:Ok maybe open source

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't imagine such a thing would be making direct ODBC calls to the RDBMS. It's probably going through Oracle's filesystem layer, and/or use various fancy protocols like WebDAV, LDAP, before hitting the storage layer.

Basically if it was easy to make a 2-Tier Groupware application using just Mozilla and Postgres, we'd have one already.

Re:Dear god no...

[SlashDread]

Because mailing appointments and invites and auto arranging meetings is Very Handy for largish workgroups.
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:Well..

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Nope. Articles I have read over the years, such as this [dba-oracle.com] or this [g4tv.com], tell me that Ellison hates Gates.

Perhaps I should have posted the links above in my original comment.

Exchange Killer?

[tzanger]

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:The real challenge

[LionKimbro]

OpenExchange? [openexchange.com]

Re:Ok maybe open source

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with an Oracle back-end. As others have pointed out it will be ported onto postgres toute de suite. Let's face it Oracle loves postgres because people who start out small and mid=size come to Oracle's door when the load get's really large. Loads only get really large when business is good; when business is good there is money to be spent on a big time db for the back end. If you started out on psql the port to Oracle is pretty easy.

Re:what about Novell?-Documentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

the best places for xul reference:
http://www.xulplanet.com/references/elemref/ref_XU LElement.html [xulplanet.com]
http://mb.eschew.org/ [eschew.org]
http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/ [mozilla.org]
http://mozref.com/reference/ [mozref.com]
http://xulmaker.mozdev.org/xpath-evaluator/no_wrap /xul.xml [mozdev.org]
http://books.mozdev.org/html/index.html [mozdev.org]
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/12/28/21442 49.shtml [slashdot.org]

Schema Definition for xul (xsd)
http://xulmaker.mozdev.org/xpath-evaluator/no_wrap /xul.xsd [mozdev.org]

For live help you can try channel #xul on irc.mozilla.org. but please patient when asking questions, since most developers are probably very busy managing multiple xul projects.

Re:Exchange Killers

[beemishboy]

And it's the core of Novell's GroupWise suite, so it can be upgraded to a version supported by Novell's global staff.

It's not the core of Groupwise. Novell recently released Hula as an open source app, which open-xchange uses [open-xchange.org].
Hula is not based on Groupwise though. It was a separate project called NetMail designed separately from the ground up. I'm sure they would be somewhat compatible considering it was Novell that did it, but it is not the core of GroupWise. Novell is still testing the open source waters and wouldn't give away something like GroupWise...yet.