The biggest argument for open sourcing Lotus Notes is that it isn't selling anymore so IBM has a strong incentive to drop product support, despite the large install base.
So 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and a 50% increase in revenue generation over the last 5 years, totaling about a billion dollars/year in license sales is the definition of "isn't selling anymore?"
Do you speak English?
Domino 8.5 has a very robust implementation of JSF called Xpages. It's going to be a major part of next month's annual Lotusphere event.
the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
The Domino Web Access client was one of the very first commercial AJAX implementations and didn't use any Java whatsoever. It came out in 2001 with release 5.0.8, and could be implemented by applying a new template to your mail -- a process that could be performed by a competent administrator in about 15 seconds across an entire server.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
False. The native language to Lotus Notes is C, and there is a comprehensive C API that has been made available since version 1. The original end-user programming language was @formulas, and was styled after the 1-2-3 formula language back in 1989. In 2002, IBM released Notes/Domino version 6, which included a comprehensive rewrite of the @formula engine to dramatically improve performance and flexibility. It also added looping constructs.
However, it's not like you couldn't do loops before. Notes 4 came out in 1994, and included Lotusscript -- a VB-like scripting language, which provided a sophisticated class model and extensive OOP capabilities. Lotusscript remains the dominant language in Notes/Domino development worldwide (though many devs on the platform are moving to Java & Javascript with the latest versions.)
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Wow. Sounds like you kept top-notch entity relationship diagrams.
If you were running a MySQL database on the backend, would you know every single application in your environment that queried every table? Would that be MySQL's fault?
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
Yeah, let's kill a platform because zildgulf doesn't know how to write and document a computer program. So it must be bad!
Yeah, because it would be a smart idea for IBM to give up a billion dollars year in licensing and still have 800 full-time developers on the product. That would be a great business move, and would surely lead IBM Software Group to greater success.
That's still a fairly old code base. The Notes client underwent a massive UI update over the last two years. Here's a good demo video example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODy1-__aOX8
The Notes/Domino product line generates somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars a year for IBM in pure software sales (not services.) It's also recorded 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and has grown by over 50% since 2004.
You can see more at the long-running blog of Ed Brill, former worldwide head of sales for Notes/Domino, and currently Director of End-User Messaging and Collaboration. He just finished a year-in-review post http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/2008-the-blogging-year-in-review
The Domino server is one of the most reliable server systems ever built, particularly considering the complexity of the services it provides.
Try upgrading to a version released in the last decade.
Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.
If you want to develop open source applications ON TOP of Notes/Domino -- you can just look to http://www.openntf.org/
One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.
