A new open-source effort dubbed OpenGroupware.org has been launched with the explicit intent to create applications that compete with Microsoft Exchange server products.
OpenGroupware.org is a sister project to OpenOffice.org, a community bent on developing open-source desktop applications that compete with Microsoft's dominant Office applications. The two groups identify themselves as separate but complementary and say they intend to work together to ensure interoperability. "Just to be perfectly clear, (OpenGroupware.org) is an MS Exchange replacement," Gary Frederick, leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project, said in a statement. OpenGroupware.org is "important because it's the missing link in the open-source software stack."
In the market for communication server software, or groupware, Microsoft ranks first in number of customers, followed by IBM, Novell, Oracle and a number of smaller companies that are hoping to fill specific niches. Microsoft is set to release a new version of Exchange later this summer, the first major update to the product since releasing Exchange 2000 nearly three years ago. Frederick highlighted the OpenGroupware.org launch as the culmination of a decade-long effort to map all the key infrastructure and standard desktop applications to free software.
News source: C|Net News.com
OpenGroupware.org is a sister project to OpenOffice.org, a community bent on developing open-source desktop applications that compete with Microsoft's dominant Office applications. The two groups identify themselves as separate but complementary and say they intend to work together to ensure interoperability. "Just to be perfectly clear, (OpenGroupware.org) is an MS Exchange replacement," Gary Frederick, leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project, said in a statement. OpenGroupware.org is "important because it's the missing link in the open-source software stack."
In the market for communication server software, or groupware, Microsoft ranks first in number of customers, followed by IBM, Novell, Oracle and a number of smaller companies that are hoping to fill specific niches. Microsoft is set to release a new version of Exchange later this summer, the first major update to the product since releasing Exchange 2000 nearly three years ago. Frederick highlighted the OpenGroupware.org launch as the culmination of a decade-long effort to map all the key infrastructure and standard desktop applications to free software.
News source: C|Net News.com
Users now typically store company passwords on their handheld devices as well as their own personal data such as bank and credit card details. A quarter of users said they also downloaded corporate data.
But 73 per cent of companies have no specific security policy for mobile devices, Pointsec said.
According to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC), the responsibility for securing data lies with businesses, regardless of whether devices are personally owned or bought by the company for business use.
"The responsibility for securing data lies with the company under the seventh principle of the Data Protection Act," an OIC spokeswoman said.
"This says companies must ensure that there are appropriate technologies and procedures in place such as encryption and passwords to protect data.
"A person whose data was inappropriately retrieved if a PDA was stolen could have the right to claim compensation."
Although there are no official statistics, the Pointsec survey shows a potentially serious problem for companies.
"While we haven't seen any high-profile cases, if a doctor or social worker or a high-ranking executive in a bank has their PDA stolen, someone is going to sue an organisation," Magnus Ahlberg, managing director at Pointsec, told vnunet.com.
"The Data Protection Act states that the company or IT manager is responsible for the protection of information. There is also the risk of industrial espionage."
Even simple security measures such as ensuring the devices are password protected are ignored, according to Ahlberg.
"It is still a reasonably immature technology. There are trials of encryption software underway, but it is still in the early stages and there is a long way to go," he said.
Say Linux gets 50% or even just 20% market, with that comes resources, it's a scary thought to see open source compeat considering that things like Linux only have something like 1%, what if that was 20% considering that anyone can work on open source, theres no way any single company like Microsoft or anyone else could compeat with that, even with all the money Microsoft have, simple put, in the future, companies fighting open source are pretty much fighting the world and because of that, it's only a matter of time before open source software becomes better in almost every software there is.
The only paid IT jobs will be support, every programmer will have to expect zero money for the prduct he has to release at zero cost.
I personally do not like open source, people need paying for their time and their products.
You do not expect car makers to have to release cars for free so why software ?
And what is stopping someone from making a a product as good as Exchange? It Exchange perfect in some way and therefore cannot be equaled? That's not to say that someone will make something as good or better than Exchange, but I think it's very ignorant to say that such a thing could not happen!
Where does it say does open source doesn't pay? Where did you learn this crap which you are now spreading all over the place? Maybe you're thinking about the GPL? If so then the first thing you need to learn is that Open Source != GPL! You might be suprised to know that there are many people who are all for Open Source but completely against the GPL. Microsoft are one! Microsoft are all for the BSD license, because they are free to use code licensed user the BSD license and all they have to do is keep the copyright's in tact - otherwise they are free to do with it what they want. And that is precisely the reason why many people are pushing GPL so much - they don't want companies or individuals to grab any and all BSD licensed code and then not give anything back. But going back to this issue of not being paid - who told you that you cannot charge for GPL code? Of course you can - you just need to release the source code to those who wish to see it - that's the price you pay for being able ot use someone else's hard work. If you don't want to open up your whole applications code, then you just need to keep all the GPL'ed code in a module, a dll for instance, and then you will only need to release the code for that module, and not the rest of your application. So please, inform us all, how is it that people aren't paid?
You don't have to offer your code for free. But if someone else wants to... who are you to stop them? If a new car manufacturer came out and offered cars for free would you complain? No-one is forced to give their code away for free. However some of those people who do give their code away for free do it in such a way that you can only benefit from their work if you are willing to give back to the community and not be a leech.
The way I see it, people will still get paid to create software but it will be more specialize software, not the mainstream software most people use today, in other words, it's very likely that about 80%, 90% of software will become free and the rest is more specialize to do jobs of companies needs.
You said that you do not expect car makers to have to release cars for free, but with cars or any hardware, theres materials that we pay for, with software, they make one copy and with that one copy, they can give it to millions of people, something hardware can't do, with open source, they've found a way to make software for next to nothing, and pretty much any software we can think off, even where many love doing there work for free.
As Chris said about GPL and BSD license, the BSD one favors companies wanting to get work done on the cheap, GPL is the better option because you have to give the source back which means we all can have a look at it and inprove on it, also, if it wasn't for the GPL license, a lot of the software wouldn't be created on BSD because they would think, why should they create software only to get greedy companies take it away and sell it, thats why the GPL license is the one thats working and being pushed foreward.
I'll second that.
Most outlook/lotus notes users are only using mail and calendaring. Both of which are already in this package or as a separate system under its umbrella. It is built on stable open source packages and should give MS and Lotus a run for their money. MS is good at building features into their packages, but the cost is resources and stability.
From: http://opengroupware.org/en/users/faq/index.html
Q. Does OGo do exactly the same things like Exchange ?
A: No. OGo is something between a mixture of Exchange and SharePoint portal server. It focuses on groupware and collaboration instead of messaging, eg OGo will not provide an own mail server, but rather use existing ones like Cyrus (see the mission on that).
Outlook already connects to IMAP based mail systems. Using OpenLDAP for authentication will allow you to connect to these modular systems for your email and calendaring. Since the client doesn't care what server OS its connecting to, it shouldn't matter what client is being used. Using a modular architecture and stable products it can already replace most of the functionality of Exchange.
Some Exchange functionality NEEDS to be replaced, ever tried restoring an exchange mail store in a large system? Ugh.
The one strength that Lotus has over MS is its applications, MS can't match lotus on its applications. The whole email system in notes is an example of the application capability of Notes since afterall, its only an application within the Notes framework. The new stuff coming from MS is hardly beta quality compared to Lotus. It will be a while before opengroupware.org can match Lotus for applications as well. However, as I said.. Email and Calendaring is where its at for most companies.
Personally, I think MS is in trouble. As for Lotus, lets hope they can improve their GUIs.
krzy
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