OSAF: Building an Open-source PIM

Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)

Interesting. They're building it using Python, wxPython, and the stand-alone ZODB. Very cool to have the code be open and interepreted (this means it's user-modifiable). And like all open source software, it has not one feature not available elsewhere. They've got some big name backers, and they're hiring. Their marketing guy -- Pieter Hartsook -- has a weblog.

So they've begun building an Outlook killer. I have no doubt that they'll be able to ship something fairly quickly, especially since they're not doing anything terribly creative and they've hired real developers to do the things that aren't fun, but need doing.

If I were a Microsoft hater or competitor with a nice personal fortune, it might be fun to drop a few hundred K each year to copy the "low-hanging fruit" of the Microsoft empire, progressively weakening MS's position. Can this hurt the folks in Redmond? Hard to say. Their choice of Python should make their coding go faster than doing it in C or Java. They'll probably save 30% effort, especially since they're building on a full-featured object database (ZODB) and a fairly stable GUI toolkit (wxPython).

Getting from zero to a working beta version of software that's already been created is not a difficult task, especially when the players have worked on similar products for decades. There are lots of PIMs out there. A price-point of zero is a good way to help distribution, as is anything that specifically targets Microsoft. Picking the low-hanging fruit is easy. The tough part is subsequent versions. Do they plan on collecting revenue? If not, they'll have to have an energized developer community or deep pockets to keep development alive.

It's possible that they want to follow the POV-Ray model. Perhaps they can find some big companies (Sun and Oracle are no-brainers) who will standardize on their product and pay OSAF to continue development.

Bottom line, I think it will be interesting to techies and the anti-Microsoft Jihadis. This will be a 5-10 year battle, if they're really serious about it. I don't think they can keep it up for that long.

Update: Sun to Executives: Eat Your Own Dog Food:

Sun Microsystems is apparently taking a hard line with its executives running Microsoft Windows and Office on their machines and is strongly encouraging them to replace the software with Sun-supported products such as Solaris, Linux and StarOffice. A Tabby tattler told the Katt that even a VP who's overseeing Sun's Linux and Solaris projects was only recently persuaded to drop the Microsoft products from both his office and home computers.

  

Liars update

I have to confess that I didn't read the piece Christopher linked to before I wrote my response. This is not from laziness, but rather because I've set up my proxy server to block access to news and other time-wasting sites during work hours and into the evening.

I did read it last night and I was disturbed by the Democrat's accusation that Republican Senators had been briefed prior to the public announcement and that information hadn't been shared with them.

It's about balance. As I note above, Bush is not a balanced fellow. He and his advisers always look for the advantage. Seems to me that this has always been a hallmark of the Republicans -- they press their advantages to the limit of decency (and often beyond). Their opponents.... Well, Will Rogers said, "I belong to no organized party. I'm a Democrat."

People split on different ideological lines now, so I'm interested to the political repercussions of these issues. One byproduct of the Republicans' overt graspings is that they get caught at it and look like they're taking unfair political advantage of the situation. Did anyone really think that the proper solution to the terror attacks was drilling in ANWR? I think Bush could have delivered a political haymaker by shifting a bit to the left in the wake of the tragedy. Don't deride conservation, encourage it! Thrift, per se is a strong American value that has been woefully ignored lately. I think we'd react extremely positively to the idea that we can do something right here, right now to make things better. No reason we couldn't cut our fuel consumption by 5%. I could drive 5% less, carpool 5% more, whatever.

People react positively when politicians play against type. We loved Bill Clinton, because he had the reflexes of a Democrat and the policies of a Republican. Bush did a pretty dramatic bait and switch after he got into office. He toned down the compassion and turned up the conservatism. We know what to expect from him. If he'd just suprise us a little, he'd have the public hook, line, and sinker. Unfortunately (for him), the bulldog instincts that serve him so well in foreign policy come back to -- uh -- bite him in the domestic sphere.

Domestically, he's a numbskull.