Network software maker Novell has announced software for handling e-mail, calendars and contacts on Linux systems, as well as an automated patch management tool for Microsoft’s Windows.
Novell announces new Windows, Linux tools
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Why did they bother? The next release of Evolution (owned by Novell since they bought Ximian, for those who’ve been living under a rock) has groupwise support.
Althought the announcement that they’re developing a GAIM plugin is good news – it’s good to see a company getting behind open source in the way that Novell are, rather than the usual method from big software companies of just releasing closed source versions (although that’s still good for getting people to use Linux in the first place).
I dont think they own Evolution. They just employ majority
or all of the active developers.
I would definitely say they own Evolution. They own the copyright to it. It is simply distributed under the GPL.
Are they not just going to extend Evolution to support Groupwise? I don’t see why they would duplicate a PIM client.
You’re misunderstanding what they are releasing here. They are releasing Groupwise 6.5…..this is the full Groupware server suite…..not the Groupwise client. This release simply adds Linux as another option for installing the Groupwise server components.
In other words, it is a good thing.
Why wouldn’t this be a good thing? This isn’t taking anything away from Evolution. This enables companies who use GroupWise, and there are some out there, to use something besides a windows client for integrated messaging/calendaring. For me, I’ll have more of an option to move users to a Linux desktop with less training issues… the Linux GW client (reasonably) closely mirrors the Windows client (the Linux and Mac clients are new for GW6.5).
I can’t wait to see it. I wonder if they’re going to have some type of demo server I can download, to see if I like it. We use Outlook/Exchange at work, and, while I was happy to migrate to it (our old system was based upon Openmail, a really, really old HP system), it still does somethings that are rather flakey to me.
They are backing open source. Skrew MS Window.
Acknowledging commercial reality of *now*.
They have a Windows tool and will keep doing that but it looks like they are focusing their development energies elsewhere – in particular it looks like they are trying to build an end-to-end stack from client to server with linux technologies meshing with groupwise and netware.
Opensourcing YaST and then this announcement are just bloody marvellous.
..because it is that damned ‘Exchange/Outlook’ replacement for what we have looked for years. Ok, yeah, it’s comercial, so what?
It’s for enterprise, damned 
If you want free version, go, help OpenGroupWare.org to develop Evolution Conector (development is a little bit stalled for a moment, but in any case, I’m looking to switch in on that).
And no, Evolution support for Groupwise is NOT prioritary, is under LGPL only (which is less strict GPL version).
I really love Novell after these certain steps in the right direction