Free software and priorities?

[Paul Tansom]

** Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> [2007-09-25 16:59]:
> On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 17:28 +0200, Giacomo Poderi wrote:
> > MJ Ray ha scritto:
> > > I think that's more thoughtlessness and ignorance of the free software
> > > alternatives, like when people use gmail instead of a free software
> > > webmail.
> > 
> > [OT]Could you please mention some of these free software webmail, didn't
> > find many
> 
> <marketing> www.bongo-project.org is already ok-ish and will be amazing
> eventually ;) </marketing> 
> 
> Seriously, there are a number of different projects which work in
> different situations: SquirrelMail (a bit ugly, though) and Horde/et al.
> (which you can run on top of Kolab) are the best known ones.
** end quote [Alex Hudson]

All good projects, but none are alternatives to Gmail since they are
purely the application and not a service. Things like Operamail,
Hotmail, etc. are comparable to Gmail, but clearly no better on an
ethical stand point.

As an aside, if you are looking for a webmail application the best one
I've come across so far by an order of magnitude is Roundcube[1]. Horde
doesn't come near it in terms of ease of installation (in fact the
hassle of putting the Horde framework on to then get IMP has put me off
entirely(*) - perhaps if I wanted the full suite of applications, but
last time I looked they were far from ready), and it makes the
SquirrelMail look like something out of the ark. It is still in beta,
but at rc1 at the moment.

[1] http://www.roundcube.net/ (#)
(*) to be fair you can get it through apt-get in Debian (although it has
tended to be noteably out of date) and probably similar with other
distros, but I prefer putting web applications on by hand downloaded
from the developers website
(#) sorry Alex, Bongo does look promising, but is a way off from prime
time at the moment - keep it up though :)

--
Paul Tansom  |  http://www.whaletales.co.uk/
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