Title: Lotus notes for Linux

Author: 

Date: 24 July 2006 05:02:40 +01:00 or Mon, 24 July 2006 05:02:40 +01:00

Summary: IBM get Lotus Notes for Linux out a year earlier than planned.

Body: I'm impressed. IBM has brought Lotus Notes to the Linux desktop a full year ahead of schedule. Normally, of course, one would expect it to be a year late! I suspect in the not too distant future this is going to be seen as an important achievement, because quite a lot of smaller businesses use Notes to build custom back office applications when they have a tight budget. By decoupling notes from Windows IBM are offering such companies not merely the opportunity, but an incentive to switch to Linux and avoid Windows license fees.

One of the most interesting aspects of IBM's strategy is that it has made Notes licenses fully transferable. If you run Notes on Windows today, you can re-install Linux on the same machine and use the Linux version of Notes without paying any extra fees. Neat. Very neat.

If you put this together with Novell's new highly polished SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, it's entirely possible that we might be looking at a genuine killer app for small and medium sized businesses. And the irony of the whole situation is that the inventor of Lotus Notes was Ray Ozzie - who is now Microsoft's Chief Software Architect!

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=13136E8:1F69382

Notes: 

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