Campaign to Open Source IBM's Notes/Domino 255
Ian Tree, an IT consultant from the Netherlands, has started a campaign to convince IBM to open source the code for Notes/Domino. Hoping for results similar to the push for Sun to open source Solaris, which finally saw success in 2005, Tree makes the simple point that it won't happen until someone asks. "By being an open source product, Tree is also hoping that Domino becomes something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts, which is the holy grail for future market adoption. This is how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized. While the idea of open sourcing any proprietary program is appealing, in as much as it sets a program free to live beyond the commitment (or lack thereof) of its originator, it is hard to see why open Notes/Domino would have any more impact than OpenSolaris."
*ring*ring* (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, can I talk to the product manager of Outlook? Thanks, I'll hold.
Hello? Hi, I think it would be spiffy if you would consider open-sourcing Outlook. No, the whole shebang, not just the client. Yeah, server side components and everything.
I think it would prolong the life of the product since it would allow it to exist beyond your commitment to it. And you know, as the saying goes, more eyes lead to shallower bugs.
So what I'm proposing is that you open up the source and give it away for free. Then you could...
Hello? Hello?
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.
If you want to develop open source applications ON TOP of Notes/Domino -- you can just look to http://www.openntf.org/ [openntf.org]
It's hard to imagine... (Score:2, Insightful)
...the horrors that must lie waiting within the source code for Lotus Notes.
Schools could use the Notes source to teach the basics of how to build slow, confusing, fragile applications with utterly non-standard user interfaces. Notes is by far the worst piece of software I use regularly. On the other hand, opening its source would let me fix that bug that keeps reminding me I missed the same meeting reminders over and over again.
Re:It's hard to imagine... (Score:3, Insightful)
opening its source would let me fix that bug that keeps reminding me I missed the same meeting reminders over and over again.
If you could find the bug :)
Re:uh, no? (Score:5, Insightful)
The patents linked to the products, makes it a no-go. Besides, IBM still makes a lot of money from Notes/Domino.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a fair reason in general, but the only reason I know of to interoperate with Notes is to export the data to something else.
What was it before there was Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, Netscape. I was never a fan of Netscape. I thought MSIE was better and faster for the longest while. Netscape was, at one time, very closed. But once things got going, Firefox came out of it. Perhaps the same might happen with this? People WANT an open source groupware server and the ones that exist now seem to lack in one way or another. But perhaps a project that starts with working code, just as Firefox started out, could turn into something a lot better... something that could kick Exchange and MS Office to the curb.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gimp is open source and it's UI sucks too.
Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:1, Insightful)
If some groupware were to be introduced to people along with traditional email when they first learn an office package, you could actually have people creating calendar events and sharing them out the door, instead of constantly sending emails to eachother, ignoring the actual capabilities of the software suite they have.
To each his own. I always found it really rude that people would "share a calendar event" with me in Outlook, essentially scheduling me for meetings that I knew nothing about, sight unseen, based on nothing more than the fact that I hadn't filled in any other appointment on my computer calendar. It seems like the normal thing to do would be to shoot me a quick email and ask me if I was available, but the software encourages otherwise. They call it "groupware," but to me it just increases animosity within teams by eliminating the respect and natural give-and-take that comes with actual facetime.
Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know very much about the consumer/client side to notes, but I work on quite a bit of web apps that use the Domino (server-side) part, and I'm telling you, I wouldn't work with anything else. The ease at which I can create a system using Domino leaves something like ASP (which I've worked with too) in the dust.
And it's not even anything fancy to do with UI -- just the security aspects of building a web application with Domino is by far the easiest thing I've ever done. Heck, just the individual user security settings I have at my disposal would make me choose it over anything else.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CouchDB (Score:5, Insightful)
And your own appeal to authority would work better if you had a little more respect for the most popular LISP dialect in the world. Seriously. [crockford.com]
But consider two things: First, the storage is JSON [json.org] (not JavaScript), and I don't actually know that it's the on-disk format (I doubt it), only that it's the format exposed to developers. What would you use in place of it, for a schema-free database? XML? ASN.1? Serialized objects in $my_favorite_language?
And for what it's worth, JSON is not just Javascript -- it's also valid notation (as in, you can pipe it through eval, if you really want to) for Python, Ruby 1.9, and probably others I don't know about.
The only better candidate I can think of is YAML [yaml.org], which is more complex to parse, and a superset of JSON anyway.
Second, the views (sort of a query language) aren't necessarily Javascript. It's true, Javascript is the default view format, but it can actually be any language that can operate on text sent via a Unix pipe. I hear Python developers are using it with some success.
But given the choice, would you rather write SQL than JavaScript? Really?
Of course, it also has the nice side effect that you can write an entire application in JavaScript, using AJAX, talking directly to the CouchDB server. But I'm guessing that's a side effect, not the real reason Javascript was chosen.
So press decline (Score:3, Insightful)
The "decline" button is there for a reason.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if you consider 1996 to be a few years ago. Domino's biggest problem is that it has been too far ahead of it's competitors, so it is common for people not to understand the benefits that it offers, and by the time the rest of the industry catches up, the features have been rebuild a little different, and the people who now start to understand it complain because the feature that Domino had a decade earlier doesn't look just like the program that was developed this year.
Notes? Please no!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been forced to use Lotus Notes at work for 10 years now. If you don't understand why people hate Notes just Google "Lotus Notes sucks" and you'll find plenty of detailed explanations of the several million things that are wrong with Notes.
Notes must die.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely because Gimp is open source that someone was able to tweak its GUI and make GimpShop [gimpshop.com]. That's qbzzt's point.
Re:Please, No! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right. We got that song-and-dance from IBM/Lotus when 5 came out. "5's just as good as Outlook!" It ain't. Then when 6 came out. Oh look! Version 6, someone at IBM finally heard of this thing called a "scrollwheel" and it works... about a third of the time. And hey, guess what, it only took IBM until version 6.5 to get Notes working correctly on a multi-user Windows OS. That's only 10+ years after multi-user Windows OSes came out! Lightning development pace.
The number of extremely trivial, basic features that have *never* worked right is unbelievable-- hell, just try to get Out Of Office messages turned on in less than 3 hours. Oh, and my personal favorite was the lack of any kind of sanity-checking: Notes loved to schedule meetings that ended before they began, which of course broke syncing to every PDA known to man and resulted in an extremely busy helpdesk worker.
Notes is a lost product. Not only does it have a legendarily bad UI, but there's not a single Notes developer capable of writing a good UI; it's simply not in their DNA.
(Yes, yes, I know, now the Notes fan comes in and tells me that our install was "misconfigured", despite the fact that it was the default email configuration from the CD, and tell us that Notes is "more than just email", despite the fact that IBM sold it to us to do email, etc, etc. I've heard it all before; don't bother.)
Re:CouchDB (Score:3, Insightful)
Please stop confusing people. Having lambdas and eval is not enough to be a Lisp dialect, otherwise half of existing scripting languages (including e.g. Python) would be that. Lisp is about S-exprs and code-as-data, the rest is secondary. A language can be reasonably said to be a Lisp dialect when its implementation of eval can be written in itself with roughtly the same effort as Lisp one.
S-expressions.
Yes, absolutely, and here's why. SQL has a lot of quirks, but it is still designed as a declarative query language - side-effect free, lenient evaluation, no guaranteed evaluation order - all very important to enable advanced query optimizaters. JS is still an imperative language at heart, and having first-class functions doesn't change that. Yes, you can go halfway there by using lambdas and such, but JS lambda notation is really way too verbose for that sort of thing (compare JS "function(x) { return x > 0 }" to e.g. C# 3.0 "x => x > 0" to see what I mean).
Re:CouchDB (Score:3, Insightful)
In 2008, not really. The only two big players left without lambdas are C++ and Java. Of those, C++ is getting them in the upcoming major revision of the standard, and Java has an erzats called "anonymous inner classes", which is actually close enough for many practical purposes, even if extremely verbose. Perl, Python, Ruby all have first-class functions. C# has had them for 3 years now. Heck, even VB has had them for more than a year!
Not at all. Having the source as a string is no good - having it as an AST in the format native to the language, which can be easily manipulated and eval'ed, is what is needed.
Horizontally scaling linear scans is trivial, and pretty much any SQL database can do it as well. Knowing what to index (or split) and when is part of being a DBA (which I'm not - though of course I know the basics). Scaling and parallelizing queries over indices isn't that hard, either, and modern RDBMS do it well enough.
I'm not a big fan of SQL as such myself - it's certainly too messy and non-orthogonal. A good example of a decent modern query DSL is XQuery; its only major issue is that it doesn't have first-class functions.
Well, I guess we'll live and see how the test of time goes for Couch...
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, is it bad that I read that as "the new client sits on top of $FASHIONABLE_STACK and runs on $FASHIONABLE_OS_LIST...".
Well yes but its a fashionable open source stack that they happen to have a large hand in developing. Its also a very nice stack. So yeah its bad, but its probably your fault, not the grand parents.
Re:Oh God NO! Not Lotus Notes again! (Score:5, Insightful)
the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
The Domino Web Access client was one of the very first commercial AJAX implementations and didn't use any Java whatsoever. It came out in 2001 with release 5.0.8, and could be implemented by applying a new template to your mail -- a process that could be performed by a competent administrator in about 15 seconds across an entire server.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
False. The native language to Lotus Notes is C, and there is a comprehensive C API that has been made available since version 1. The original end-user programming language was @formulas, and was styled after the 1-2-3 formula language back in 1989. In 2002, IBM released Notes/Domino version 6, which included a comprehensive rewrite of the @formula engine to dramatically improve performance and flexibility. It also added looping constructs.
However, it's not like you couldn't do loops before. Notes 4 came out in 1994, and included Lotusscript -- a VB-like scripting language, which provided a sophisticated class model and extensive OOP capabilities. Lotusscript remains the dominant language in Notes/Domino development worldwide (though many devs on the platform are moving to Java & Javascript with the latest versions.)
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Wow. Sounds like you kept top-notch entity relationship diagrams.
If you were running a MySQL database on the backend, would you know every single application in your environment that queried every table? Would that be MySQL's fault?
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
Yeah, let's kill a platform because zildgulf doesn't know how to write and document a computer program. So it must be bad!