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Re: What about Aethera?
by Bill on Thursday 26/Jun/2003, @12:17
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That's because Aethera is terrible. It's very, very slow. Closed source. Last time I used it (admittedly close to a year ago) it, it wouldn't import my old email inboxes correctly (from Eudora). And it's a Qt app (which has be ported from Qt2->Qt3). Not that the last is a bad thing, it just means its not going to behave like the rest of your KDE apps.
All in all, Aethera, while having a *much* cooler name, is probably not the best solution. Not sure if Kontact is or not, but you've gotta admit that its impressive how far they've come in such a short time. Aethera's been under development since before January 2001.
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Aethera IS open source
by Rick Moen on Thursday 10/Jul/2003, @01:50
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Bill wrote:
> Closed source.
Nope, Aethera is GPLv2, incorporating some MIT/X-licensed code from the antecedant Magellan project from which it was forked.
What you're probably thinking about is theKompany's proprietary optional plug-ins for Aethera, most (all?) of which are proprietary.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
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Confirmed: Aethera is GPLv2
by Rick Moen on Thursday 10/Jul/2003, @03:33
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Because I keep seeing people, including KDE core developers, claim that Aethera isn't open source, I've done my best to [re-]investigate, this evening. I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, because I maintain http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/applications-muas.html (a list of 117 known MUAs for Linux, classified by licence category and individually described), and try to keep it accurate.
It looks like theKompany has been at times slow in getting source tarballs out in public, e.g., with their current RC2 release, available as binaries only via a SourceForge site. However, such annoyances aside, the core application is indeed open source under GPLv2. You need only have a look at the contents of http://ftp.kde.com/Office/Groupware/Aethera/aethera-2.0.tar.gz .
As I mentioned in my other posting (earlier), it IS true that theKompany would like to sell you various optional Aethera plug-ins (such as Jabber support) under proprietary licensing, but Aethera is functional without them.
Personally, I'm much, much more enthusiastic about the Kolab server (and its Kontact client), as full-blown groupware using real open standards has been a big hole in the Linux world for a long time. Open Source Application Foundation also intends to fill this hole eventually with a long-overdue implementation of the IETF CAP and RFC-2445 "iCalendar" protocols for scheduling servers, but only after the Chandler PIM is done, so that's probably going to take a while. But either of these combinations will be a major win.
I try to track developments in that area at: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/groupware
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
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Re: What about Aethera?
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 26/Jun/2003, @12:37
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> Why start another one when there is already a project out there?
Aside from the reasons already gives this is pretty grossly missing the facts. I'll grant you that it is good to see if you can possibly join another open source project before spinning off another, but as mentioned Aethera's not open source. IIRC it started that way and the question could have been asked of it. The point of my first staement is that in fact Aethera set about recreating much of the functionality of several KDE apps while making use of some in reusable kparts. Kontact is making the progress so quickly exactly because it's *not* starting over but building on existing KDE apps. In fact Kontact is first of all a shell for four KDE apps as mentioned.
In addition IIRC Aethera doesn't have a server solution, or at least an attractive one. I forget the name but there is another KDE email app using a free server that also falls into this category, though I'm not sure it's been developed much since KDE 2. Substantial improvements for group usage is being contributed to KDE in the German contract for these improvements. The Kolab server will also result meaning that there will be a free server replacement for M$ Exchange that runs on Linux and serves both outlook and Kontact which will then interact on a level not previously possible. This will be huge!
In any way you care to look at it Aethera wan't even close as a choice.
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What about Infusion
by andrianarivony on Thursday 26/Jun/2003, @14:32
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> I forget the name but there is another KDE email app using a free server
> that also falls into this category, though I'm not sure it's been developed
> much since KDE 2
It's called Infusion http://www.shadowcom.net/Software/infusion/
Infusion was using the Citadel/UX server http://uncensored.citadel.org/citadel/
"Citadel can send mail between local users, send and receive internet mail, and make mail available to internet users. This brilliant arrangement means that, as far as mail is concerned, any diehard Mutt user such as myself can happily coexist on a Citadel/UX network with Infusion users" (Navindra Umanee in "Focus on infusion" http://dot.kde.org/992627943/ )
Infusion was promising. Unfortunatly it seem that no one join the developper to help him.
See also "More on Citadel" http://dot.kde.org/992627943/992676648/
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Re: What about Aethera?
by Scott Wheeler on Thursday 26/Jun/2003, @23:51
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They're really quite different approaches -- Kontact is basically about reusing mature parts of KDE and wrapping them up and plugging them into a single application. All of the code from those projects is shared in Kontact and needn't be maintained separately.
To put things in perspective, if you sum the parts of KDE PIM that make up Kontact: KMail, KOrganizer, KNotes, KAddressbook, libkdenetwork, libkdepim -- and finally the glue between them, Kontact, it's around 200,000 lines of code. Kontact is about 4,000 -- 2% -- of that total (i.e. slightly larger than KNotes).
So really, if you want to talk about duplication of effort and reuing what's available -- that's exactly what Kontact does. Aethera, on the other hand, rather than being a small wrapper around these existing apps, must duplicate all that they do.
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