It all sounds a bit, um, icky. And I'm guessing that the development of the connector isn't going to be at all publically discussed. And I'm a little frustrated that the mail client that I thought was this huge effort on the part of the community to write the app that's going to be a /huge/ part in bringing Linux to the desktop is only going to be the answer to Outlook in a "Yeah, use Evolution. It's cool. Oh, but you have to pay for Exchange interoperability." way, and that no-one mentioned this before. Feels almost like we have to start again, to find another way of arguing "Linux is free. You can do _this_ with it." to our bosses.
The thing is, in a perfect world, Richard Stallman would be in good terms with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the corporate world. Of course that's a ridiculous thought. I was reading the article on The Register about this, and I thought it was generally an excellent business decision by Ximian. I've seen enough bankruptcies and depressing economic news (add to that the general mass failures of open source companies like VA) to know that a GPL'ed company cannot survive in today's economy. Ximian must make money, and they've decided to go about it in the best way possible. I think any reasonable person should be supportive of them in this decision. As far as the "linux is free" thing, you must first of all consider that Exchange is not linux, is not open source, and is not free. So since the company is already using a proprietary server solution, they should be ready to pay for a proprietary client anyhow. They would still save a good deal of money (compare connector cost to that of Windows + MS office, and don't forget the virus factor) by switching to Linux. However, I do wish that the Open Source community had an answer for MS Exchange. Then yes, we can begin to sound the "linux is free" trumpet without any moral reservatinos. Ibukun
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