Quoting myself: > In contrast, Microsoft Exchange does only one set of things it was > built to do, in one specific way (whose design and operation I happen > to think is an engineering disaster). Microsoft Corporation markets > this as a virtue and calls it "integration".
One of the _lesser_ reasons it's an engineering disaster is its bad habit of regularly auto-corrupting its message store. Continuing in that vein, I just re-found a post I made on that subject elsewhere: From rick Tue Oct 15 07:42:41 2002 Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 07:42:41 -0700 To: Todd Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [buug] RE: Buug digest, Vol 1 #388 - 8 msgs Quoting Todd Lee ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > 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. -- "Is it not the beauty of an asynchronous form of discussion that one can go and make cups of tea, floss the cat, fluff the geraniums, open the kitchen window and scream out it with operatic force, volume, and decorum, and then return to the vexed glowing letters calmer of mind and soul?" -- The Cube, forum3000.org _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
