18 Jan 2005 bolsh   » (Master)

So there seems to be some hullaballoo about Evolution being ported to Windows.

I agree that this is a Good Thing. The more choice we give people, the better off they, and we, will be. Plus, there is no doubt that porting Evo to windows will get it a larger user base, and some corporate acceptance. And it'll remove lots of artificial barriers against having GNU/Linux or Unix on the server side. So all in all, yay!

But... (what follows is an experiment with "Stream of Thought", so I may end up disagreeing with myself. This is healthy)

The main argument of people against this kind of thing is that if people can use all their free software applications on Windows, there's no incentive to change platforms. Proponents argue that when the only piece of software that you have to pay for is your OS, the choice is obvious and you switch. So when you get into TCO fights with Windows people, they can now say "thanks for all the groupware, you have just reduced our TCO, making Windows an even more attractive proposition for the enterprise". But then wa can reply "Sure - but we've also reduced the TCO for migrating to GNOME, since all those enterprise users don't need any retraining any more".

Of course, Microsoft will never argue that you can use free software on your Windows machine to reduce TCO - that would be hari-kiri of the highest order. But if they did, then I guess we have a counter-argument.

Also, in related news, Chandler, the Mitch Kapor backed groupware solution modelled on Domino, as far as I can tell, has had a change of direction. The guys over there have realised that big milestones which nobody uses have been slowing them down, so they are moving to what they call a "dogfood" model of development. That means that with their next version, 0.5, you will actually be able to do stuff like calendaring. Good work, guys! I hope that there has been some thought to coming up with an open standard for calendaring to share with the Evo and Sunbird projects (but I guess that goes without saying).

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