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"Was what I said totally unfounded?"

You were wrong; Evolution is not part of GNOME.

"I use Thunderbird. It's small light, and runs on most platforms."

I use Thunderbird too but "small" and "light" are not words I would use to describe it.

"Why need Evolution be written so tightly into Gnome?"
So don't use it? It's not like you're forced to use Evolution.

No, you are wrong. As GNOME 2.8, Evolution is an official component of GNOME:

"One of the most user-visible changes in GNOME 2.8 is the inclusion of Evolution 2.0 mail user agent in the base desktop. While many distributors already include Evolution as part of GNOME, this is the first time that Evolution will ship alongside the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform officially."

http://gnomejournal.org/article/8/evolution-20

Edited 2007-07-05 04:46 UTC

Something that is deliberately inaccurate can be viewed by some here as little more than 'flame bait' to stir up a bee's nest. You well and truely know that Evolution is not shareware; it has been an opensource project since its early days when Ximian was a stand alone company, along when Nautilus was based around the Mozilla core (and the parent company tried to sell value added services ontop of it - to fund their opensource development).



Which proves absolutely nothing. Its Novell branding the application to fit into the rest of their customised desktop environment - that is no different to the branding that Sun Microsystems does, for example, to GNOME and Evolution, branding it with the monkier of 'Java Desktop Environment'.

To claim that Novell somehow owns or controls Evolution is a pathetic attempt to some how distort reality when it comes to commercial patronage of opensource projects. Evolution is owned by the community and controlled by the community; Novell will make 'customised' changes available to the 'community' and it is up to the 'community' to decide whether to merge those changes back into the mainline.



Which again, competely ignores reality - the largest contributor to GTK+ in regards to win32 maintain and compatibility is Novell. Novell is currently working on bringing Evolution to Windows so that it can work to replace their current Windows client - IIRC they are also working at bringing GTK+ to MacOS X (Along with a third party).

So don't try to dumb the debate down into a 'Novell vs. OpenSource' because it quite frankly simply turns this forum into a third rate digg/slashdot forum rather than something of a reasonable level of debate.

I am a Gnome user and maintainer, and I use Evolution daily, so I'm not arguing on the anti-Evo side. But the fact is that Evolution is owned by Novell. The Evolution maintainers require copyright assignment to Novell from all contributors. See "Patch Submission Process" near the bottom of http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/patch.shtml

You're right, you shouldn't have been voted down. Your post certainly was nothing of these things, but it still was wrong.



Yes, your comment was totally unfounded. The SLED version of Evolution is called Novell Evolution, the e. g. Debian version is not. That's because this software is FOSS. The Evolution Data Server (which, BTW, is a local daemon to make Evolution services available to the system) is also FOSS and available in every distribution that ships Evolution, you can download its source here, if you want:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/download.shtml
(note that this is a Gnome site)



Well, I run Thunderbird, too, because I only need an E-Mail client. Evolution is a so called personal information manager and if you read the page you linked closely you would realize that Evolution is targeted at other people than you and me (actually it is targeted at me, but I use a different solution for calendaring). And Evolution is not tightly written into Gnome, you can remove the frontend Evolution without hassle and you can remove the Evolution Data Server, too, with some more pain, because it is a damn useful tool and many apps use it. I've done so anyway and it works without a problem.

EDIT: fixed tags

Edited 2007-07-05 09:49