Re: [Fsfe-uk] Savage discounts from MS flush OSS desktop from Newham (the Reg)

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 10:53, Tom Coady wrote:
> Not to belittle netproject, but how hard can it be to demonstrate viable 
> FLOSS alternatives? And as for Mr Gates, it reminds me of something 
> feudal, like the release of political prisoners to celebrate the King's 
> birthday.

SODA is an interesting and exciting architecture in it's own right. It's
not an alternative to Windows by providing an identical environment,
it's a different environment which allows you to perform the same tasks.
What I mean is that they haven't just installed Gnome in an attempt to
show a similar desktop with the same features.

For a start, SODA has a smart-card system for access to terminals, and
integrates a lot of the large-scale administration systems that you
would need to manage a large desktop network. That's important, because
we don't really have an answer to Active Directory (in either features
or ease of roll-out). 

The continuing problem is still groupware. And in groupware, calendering
is by far the hardest thing still :( There is no particular calender
server that is useful, there are no cross-platform clients which work
well, and there are seemingly few people developing them. There is no
useful standard for client->server calender operation (beyond webdav..).
So, demonstrating a viable Exchange alternative would still be pretty
neat (although I don't think Netproject have solved that one yet
either).

Cheersm

Alex.