The Apple and open source / open file format debate continues.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, made a contribution that drew some attention. He is going to switch to Linux.

Rui Carmo at Tao of Mac also has some interesting things to say. He argues that Open Format is the real issue here, not open-sourced apps.

Still, he can’t help wondering if,

… Mail.app (for one) wouldn’t be considerably better than it currently is if its core bits had half the exposure that WebKit has, or if iChat would have had a chance to evolve to become the standards-uncompliant mess that it is if it were based off Gaim or, better still, the odd-named application that replaced Gnomemeeting.

I have a feeling that they would at least be more interoperable with other stuff, which entails having the decency of supporting IMAP IDLE and SIP/H.323 properly – and hopefully causing considerably less pain to their users.

Making Mail.app more open to developers was one of the key desires that emerged from the “Talking Mail.app” interviews with John Gruber, Merlin Mann, Scott Morrison, drunkenbatman, Leander Kahney, Brent Simmons, et al.

Of course, wishing don’t make it so, but it’s still fun to wonder.

What if?open source, open format, apple, linux, mail.app, apple mail, imap

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Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, imap, Linux, mail.app, open format, open source

This entry was posted on Thursday, 22nd June, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.