[Alpine-info] formats for both Alpine and Thunderbird

[David Morris]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Mark Crispin wrote:


> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, David Morris wrote:

>> I'd love to see a cost comparison for UW's costs supporting the 

>> pine/alpine/imap tools we love vs. a commercial solution from MS, etc.

>

> UW is in the process of converting to Outlook and Exchange.

> 	http://www.washington.edu/computing/uwexchange/

>

>> Attributing this to a conspiracy rather than good business logic just 

>> doesn't hold water.

>

> I was specifically told, by both Microsoft and Google, that their goals do 

> NOT include standards compliance; and furthermore that their products will 

> NEVER be fully compliant because that would make it easier for customers to 

> use competitors' products.

>

> You may call that "good business logic".  I call it conspiracy.  The US 

> Justice Department and the European Union feel the same way.  Microsoft is a 

> convicted monopolist.


I was referring to UW's decision in the face of alternatives presented. 
You've said nothing to refute my hypothesis that UW is spending less money
now using Exchange then they were spending supporting the pine/alpine 
development team and associated infrastructure. Might also be that 
features of Outlook/Exchange were superior to Pine/Alpine+IMAP. I can't 
compare because I only use pine in character mode on the machine with the
mail server.

I really doubt the opinions expressed to you were the 
official position of either company. Executives of both of those companies 
are too smart to make such statements. There is a pretty fine line between
making the decision to not work better with some IETF RFC ... whose only 
force of 'law' is community agreement ... because what they have already
works well enough and there is no ROI for additional investment ... and 
expressly creating an incompatible implementation to make it difficult for
competitors.

Given the penatration of Exchange in the MDA server market,
nothing I'm aware of would prevent your team from accommodating Exchange's 
failures. Probably could even mimic the built-in exchange server/outlook 
protocol in pine/alpine if you wished.

Dave Morris