[buug] RE: Buug digest, Vol 1 #388 - 8 msgs

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Todd Lee (todd at LANtech-HI.com):

> I was wondering the same thing.  I have used many mailers, as far as MTA's
> go, Exchange is easily beaten, but the main selling point of Exchange is its
> groupware ability i.e. the sharing of public folders.  I've also looked at
> bynari.net and a few other suites like oracle's communicator, these all have
> the same licensing constraints although, they will run on many flavors of
> *nix.  I was wondering if there was a GPL'd version out there that I never
> heard of?

*ix guys will tell you that point'n'drool groupware isn't difficult to
find.  There are all sorts of Webified things like wiki software, for
example.  (Twiki is GPLed, for example, and there is similar stuff made
using Zope.)  If *ix guys want a group discussion for themselves,
they'll have a mailing list -- or, better yet, a newsgroup.  

The executwits who get the hots for Exchange Server don't _just_ want
group discussion, and they don't _just_ want GUIfied group discussion.
They want "integration".  They want the same client software (e.g.,
MS-Outlook) to do everything and anything, without their feeble little
minds having to grasp the distinctions among e-mail, group discussion,
and scheduling.

When you include _that_ in the set of specifications to a *ix author who
publishes tools for people under an open-source or viewable-source
licence, he'll probably say "That level of integration is a bad idea.
Not only does it lock you in to a proprietary, single-source
architecture, but also it prevents you from using best-of-breed for
each.  And the whole hairball becomes a single point of failure liability.
And for what?"

If you tell him the executive staff want it anyway, he'll say "OK, since
your executive staff want something really rather stupid, I'm going to
have to spend a lot of time doing dumb, pointless work to put it
together, so for that and to compensate me for what will probably be a
significant support burden, I'm going to charge you a bunch of money and
use proprietary licensing."

And so here we are.

-- 
Cheers,               "That article and its poster have been cancelled." 
Rick Moen                   -- David B. O'Donnel, sysadmin for America Online
rick at linuxmafia.com