Hot! Open source Personal Information Manager
An idea whose time has come. An open source email / calender / contacts program that allows for collaboration and easy sharing of data, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Open source is free software written in collaboration. The code is posted freely for anyone to use and modify. You need a certain add-on – go ahead and write it!
The project is headed by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Corp, who is putting 5 million of his own money into the nonprofit Open Source Applications Foundation, who will write the program. The first beta will be out be the end of the year, and I for one, will certainly use it. Begone Outlook!
From Kapor’s weblog
We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook. I’m not going to bash Outlook here. Suffice it to say that while feature-rich, it is highly very complex, which renders most of its functionality moot. Its information sharing features require use of Microsoft Exchange, a server-based product, which is both expensive and complex to administer. Exchange is overkill for small-to-medium organizations, which we think creates on opportunity we intend to pursue (as well of course as serving individual users)
Have I mentioned it’s going to run on Macintosh, Linux, and Windows and will not require a server? This is an ambitious goal, but we are convinced is possible to achieve using a cross-platform tool kit.