"Foundational" business software [LWN.net]

"Foundational" business software

Posted Jan 3, 2008 15:35 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: "Foundational" business software by yodermk
Parent article: Wild predictions for 2008

I think the real goal should be getting all of the pieces to agree on interchange methods. I
think that office suite software is already too broad an item for being all within a single
project.

It should be that, if you're using LDAP, and using the agreed-upon schema, any mail server
software you happen to pick will need no modification from the defaults for configuration.
Furthermore, all mail clients will be able to find the user's mail, again with no
configuration changes.

I think there needs to be a community of developers of different pieces of software such that,
when a mail client developer is adding something to their software to let the user mark a
message as spam, they can have the result of this action be the same as any other mail client
doing the same thing, and inform spam filter software. All of the representation decisions
that are currently made within projects and not publicized to other projects would be made
explicitly and in a forum where other projects' decisions are findable, and where the group
consensus, once one forms, is clear.

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"Foundational" business software

Posted Jan 3, 2008 19:30 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

This "integration" work is precisely what distributions do for you...

"Foundational" business software

Posted Jan 15, 2008 3:20 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

> It should be that, if you're using LDAP, and using the agreed-upon 
> schema, any mail server software you happen to pick will need no 
> modification from the defaults for configuration.

That is extremely unlikely to happen.

>Furthermore, all mail clients will be able to find the user's mail, again 
>with no configuration changes.

Multiple standards for this already exist: SLP, DNS SRV, and Rendevous (there is some overlap
among these).  Unfortunately almost no clients support them; and no Open Source client that
I'm aware of.  Partly this is because people want to setup multiple custom accounts whereas a
client supporting these would have more of a locate-my-imap-and-smtp-servers mentality.

> doing the same thing, and inform spam filter software. All of the 
> representation decisions that are currently made within projects and 
> not publicized to other projects would be made explicitly and in a 
> forum where other projects' decisions are findable, and where the group
> consensus, once one forms, is clear.

This is generally what a projects commit log and devel mailing list are.  But that doesn't
help create a standard whereby application X can understand the intent of an action performed
by application Y;  without a central broker and standard that isn't going to happen.