Yep, totally agree with you there. After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP. Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem. As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General pu…
An email client without IMAP support is not going to get much traction. No one wants to have multiple email clients open at the same time.
> An email client without IMAP support is not going to get much traction. No one wants to have multiple email clients open at the same time.
I don’t understand the link between your second sentence and the first one. How not having IMAP support forces you to have multiple email clients open at the same time?
The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…
Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…
Good. I know it might sound awful, but I feel relieved by the fact you're seeing strong resistance/reluctance towards a paid, proprietary product. Don't get me wrong though- I'm a pragmatist, and I'll gladly use any closed source solution if it's really the best to adapt to my needs and there's no open source solution I can't readily tweak for what I need.
When working on Linux, I find myself pining for Visual Studio at times, and for art Krita does have a hard time beating Clip Studio, but they've both earned their spot rightly.
I do think many people are like this though: they will use your software if they truly believe it's the best at what it does.
The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…
I completely agree. There are very few paid software for which we don't already have a FLOSS software that can compete with it. Linux users are normally good at finding FLOSS alternatives to paid softwares. Another thing that author can do is to compare Linux home users sales results with Windows home users for any of their product that is available for both platforms. Sales would be similar as long as Linux and Wind…
Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…
> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…
How is telling people what is good for them, like you just did, not fundamentalism? Almost every server and smart phone install of Linux uses proprietary software, that is clearly part of how people wants to use it. You yourself are communicating through many layers of proprietary software right now. This is exactly why people don't want to do open source. Because increasingly it isn't about culture, doing it better or making things happen. It is about telling people what to do and for people to enforce all sort of informal moral codes to protect their own position.
Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…
Honestly while it might sounds like I’m speaking out of my ass that’s a bad business model. Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that. The Office 365 web client is nearly identical these days and it runs in the browser. You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand. You can maybe focus on better mail clients for the desktop but there are quite a few goo…
I would say it is one of the most _feature complete_ email client, but I don't think it is a good email software. I've seen it crash too many times at the worst possible timings, and, latest updates have rendered almost unusable without patching on Mac for Exchange enterprise users (I even had to make a script to disable Outlook autodiscover on all our corporate macs because from 16.12 version and up it started trying to go to office 365 to authenticate a local exchange account...)
Opensource or not, I thank every company who thinks of linux as a target where it can invest. Let's face it, proprietary software needs to be in linux too if linux can eventually gain marketshare in the client landscape, and given the state of Windows 10 and its spyware, and all the big problems with MacOS since 10.10, any help to increase linux adoption out of server and embedded platforms is welcome. I will give this a try tomorrow, using linux at work and having no choice but to use evolution to get access to Exchange I think my use case is exactly the target client:)
> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…
This isn't rude at all. He was describing a situation in the Linux community where a large number of users have an aversion to paid software. It's a real problem and one of the main reason osx was able to eclipse desktop software usage on linux in such a short amount of time. Responses like yours are the real problem. If you want linux desktop software to grow, there needs to be room for proprietary software.
I don’t want “Linux desktop software” to grow. I want computer users to have zero-proprietary software.
The problem with thinking of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows and Mac OS X is that it assumes a world where proprietary software is the norm, or is okay. I believe that is isn’t okay, and that it is harmful.
> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…
I welcome it It's just impractical to have high quality software for every niche be built by the FOSS community. Even non-niche products (like, let's say email) leave a lot to be desired If I could pay companies for these products I would. But I don't because they don't make products for Linux because they think we only want FOSS programs Also, yes the creators probably don't condone proprietary software but who care…
There’s no reason free software can’t be paid for either.
I agree that not every type of software will be built by community efforts alone, which is why many companies are contributing to free software.
Out of interest, what free software would you like to see?
As an old school Linux desktop person from back in the day: whatever happened to Evolution? The whole reason it was created was to sell an Exchange client plugin.
I use Evolution every day with the evolution-ews plugin for accessing an Exchange server. It's still a bit clunky as it always was, and has some issues when switching between wired/wireless networks, but otherwise works fine for email, calendar, and contacts.
Same, once or twice a week I have to close evolution and open it again to get it to resync but otherwise it's less painful than Outlook 16 on W10.
> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…
I welcome it It's just impractical to have high quality software for every niche be built by the FOSS community. Even non-niche products (like, let's say email) leave a lot to be desired If I could pay companies for these products I would. But I don't because they don't make products for Linux because they think we only want FOSS programs Also, yes the creators probably don't condone proprietary software but who care…
> Also, yes the creators probably don't condone proprietary software but who cares.
Linus Torvalds was pretty widely quoted as saying If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. I'm pretty sure he was being sincere. The guy has praised PowerPoint, of all things.
The GNU fundamentalists are a noisy minority. That's not intended as a commentary on their usefulness or the correctness of their position, it's just a statement of fact.
> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…
This isn't rude at all. He was describing a situation in the Linux community where a large number of users have an aversion to paid software. It's a real problem and one of the main reason osx was able to eclipse desktop software usage on linux in such a short amount of time. Responses like yours are the real problem. If you want linux desktop software to grow, there needs to be room for proprietary software.
Also, please don’t conflate paid software with proprietary software. You can pay for either, but only proprietary software is the issue.