Tek-Dev

 I have spent the last few days looking at the zimbra open source mail and calendaring system. This project is hosted by Yahoo and upon further examination seems to be only semi-open source. Let me explain.. although the source code is available and the project seems to be seeking collaboration from the wider community there are several problems. The first being code availabiltiy, the zimbra project has multiple versions, such as subscription based supported versions all the ways down to an open source version. The main issue here is that the open source version is stripped of some of the nice features that come with the subscription version which seems to go against the ethos of open source. The second problem that i have with the project is the way in which contributers form outside zimbra/yahoo can contribute code changes/bug fixes. If you are not a zimbra employee you cannot make changes to the code repositories directly, you have to send your contributions along with a signed contract to zimbra, where a decision will be made on whether or not you contributions will be accepted.

This to me seems like an odd way to do business, and coders that make valuable contributions to the project are still only entitled to have a copy of the cut down "open source" version, not the feature rich one that subscribers have to pay for. At this rate i am surprised there are any contributers at all !!. One would be forgiven for speculating that zimbra have fulfilled the bare minumum necessary to brand their product open source in order to benefit form a wide variety of open source tools such as lucene, post fix, open ldap, mysql etc ..

Aside from the particular model the project uses to operate, the software is very very good and the only serious open source compeditor to the Exchange servers of this world ! What i most like about the zimbra collabouration suite is its web client. The interface is constructed from almost 100% java script, which is contained within a number of java jsp pages.. What struck me about this architecture is that if most of the nuts and bolts are javascript, then how difficult would it be to launch this type of interface from a few .aspx dot net pages.

 What i am proposing to do is to launch a new c# open source mail/calendar web based application using this type of technology. The project would be much more simple and would contain the following componetns:

 A free database with an ADO.NET client such as Firebird.

A server componant which contains all of the data acess and business logic

An open source SMTP mailer such as CSES which will be used by the server component.

An Asp.Net front end which makes use of the zimbra javascript canendar and mail client objects

Posibly a desktop client which provides similar functionality to the web client.

As a first pass i don't intend to integrate security with the active directory, an simple froms based security model could be implemented in the server to authenticate potiental users of the system.

I have already been playing around with a coupe of c# prototypes, to see what sort of architecture the sytem should take on, but what i will really need help is on porting the javascript client from zimbra's java platfrom to .Net. I am looking for as many interested .Net/Java/Javascript developers as possible to help me get this think off the ground, so if you are intereste please leave a comment at the end of this entry and i will be in touch,