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Enterprise Thunderbird doomed?Enterprise Thunderbird doomed?Posted Jun 6, 2012 12:23 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114)Parent article: Firefox 13 released
It's all nice and shiny with Thunderbird, but it would be even better, if enterprise features would get in, making Thunderbird a real alternative to the much-hated MS-Outlook. Many companies use free or partially free groupware, such as Zarafa, SOGo etc., but on the client side free software is lacking. There seems to be little interest at the side of Thunderbird development, or am I wrong? Editing LDAP contacts is on the wishlist for more than ten years now (86405), CalDAV and CardDAV sync needs the SOGo connector plugin, AFAIK.
PS: Congratulations to the new release and its cool features! If Thunderbird helps only a little bit in reducing monster attachments, we all should sing and dance. I need this for mutt, though.
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Enterprise Thunderbird doomed? Posted Jun 6, 2012 19:15 UTC (Wed) by bucky (guest, #53055) [Link]
Evolution has had read/write access to LDAP servers for several years. I've always been a little confused that Thunderbird developers can't just copy-and-paste the relevant code. They're both open source, right?
I know their licenses aren't identical, so maybe that's where the roadblock lies--Legal issues.
I hope it's not simply Not-Invented-Here ego crap.
Enterprise Thunderbird doomed? Posted Jun 6, 2012 20:10 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
> I've always been a little confused that Thunderbird developers can't just copy-and-paste the relevant code. They're both open source, right?
You have a massive misunderstanding of how software is typically structured or developed if you think that's possible for anything but the absolute very simplest of code.
The code for a feature like this is going to be dependent on heaps of internal APIs and dependencies which are going to be very different between each project.
Evolution is written in C with glib. Thunderbird is written in a mix of C++ and JavaScript, using a custom object system and STL. There is probably not even a single line of non-trivial code between the two that can be shared without having to rewrite it.
Enterprise Thunderbird doomed? Posted Jun 7, 2012 12:29 UTC (Thu) by bosyber (subscriber, #84963) [Link]
I think that at most the Thunderbird developers can look at the evolution code to see where they worked around gotcha's and issues in different LDAP implementations. That leaves a lot of sweat of the brow work to get LDAP in a working state, and then test it. Not out of the question they haven't had time and priority to do that work so far.
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