Mozilla Thunderbird

[Magnus Therning]

Jumping into the discussion in the middle...

On Sat, Jan 01, 2005 at 06:41:22PM -0800, Keith Irwin wrote:
>Wild guess, but here's where I think the Gnome folks would like to go:

This is not such a wild guess, I think. More common sense.

>1. Provide a library for storing email, contact info, tasks, and
>calendar items.

This is basically a need that has been identified a long time ago.
OpenDoc (and to some extent OLE) go some way towards this. Without
knowing the details of the GNOME implementation of these things I do
hope they've opted to use the netowrked object model (CORBA + GNORBA) to
implement it.

>2. Write clients which use this information, each client according to
>its own particular needs, as a particular "view" into this sort of
>data, and as simple and usable as possible.  (More table because less
>moving parts, perhaps.)

This is the UNIX way to do things, even though it isn't an executable
that takes arguments from the command line. It also makes it possible to
make "competing views", TB and mutt are currently competing on my
desktop for providing views on my email.

>3. Provide the possibility of interesting innovation no one has yet
>thought up.

A very important thing, I believe this is where Linux and OSS really can
shine--OSS isn't limited to the constructive genius of a few 100 (or
even a few 1000) people.

>Given the above, I can imagine a future where evolution begins to
>dissolve its all-in-one PIM interface into separate applications with
>little or no pain.  Seems to me that by removing all the "data source
>management" from the email and/or calendar and/or contact apps would
>make for more stable apps.

Well, if the evolution team is smart they might do this. Then again they
might not (for UI purposes).

I believe the most important thing is that the possibility is created
for such a losely coupled suite of programs, and personally that's what
I would use.

>With regards to security, I don't know.  I suppose someone could send
>you a script that executed "rm -rf ~" and you'd be done for, regardless
>of whether your information was stored in several different formats in
>several different places.

Security and integration are enemies, to some extent. Hopefully the
libraries (components) providing the standard interface to data is kept
small, and relatively simple. Simplicity is a good friend of security.

For some strange reason executable attachments is feared by a lot of
people. Yes, it was a moronic feature of M$ to put into their mail
reader, but that feature has, AFAIK, never appeared in ANY OSS mail
reader (and if it has then it was hopefully disabled by default). The
IMNSHO more dangerous case of social engineering with attached
executables will can hardly be mitigated by software (ignorance of a
determined user can't be addressed, I've heard stories of people saving
an attachment, opening it in WinZip, then executing the worm inside it,
all for the promise of seeing Britney Spears naked).

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
(If you can read this you are to highly educated.)
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