[TAG] (forw) Re: Linux (sendmail/imap) and Mobile Phone access

[Rick Moen]

Thread was about software options for "syncing" smartphones with
calendar/mail servers (more or less).

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:20:36 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: TAG <tag at lists.linuxgazette.net>
To: luv-main at luv.asn.au
Subject: Re: Linux (sendmail/imap) and Mobile Phone access

Quoting James Harper (james.harper at bendigoit.com.au):

> According to Slashdot, Zarafa has just been open sourced.

Rules of thumb:

1.  Be skeptical of any claim that a Web 2.0 application is open source
until you've carefully examined the actual licence.  There's been an
extremely large amount of cheating, deception, and outright lying about
licensing in this market.

2.  Be doubly, super-skeptical of those claims when you go through the
project's Web front page and find _three_ claims of open sourcing but
nothing whatsosever about the licence.

In this case, a great deal of digging, one _finally_, on a subpage,
finds a Sept. 18 press release saying that the "full core" of the Zarafa
platform will be at some unspecified time be available under Affero
GPLv3.  Affero GPLv3 is indeed a genuinely open source licence targeted
at the Web 2.0 / SaaS / hosted-software / ASP market -- even though it
isn't yet OSI-certified.

The real remaining question, then, is whether the "full core" --
whatever that means -- will be turn out to be a viable, useful piece of
software.  Another scam that's _extremely_ common in Web 2.0 space is to 
have a deliberately buggy, undocumented, incomplete "community" version
under open source licensing, functioning strictly as a sales come-on to
upsell users to a "commercial" (proprietary) version.  

I'm trying to remember the leading example.  Hmm, Sug[censored for
reasons of legal self-defence] 

If you want to know without doing a pilot installation of your own, wait
for comments on the Debian package.  ;->


----- End forwarded message -----