Evolution which sounds like revolution

There are several significant developments within Evolution community which interests me most:

1. First, Evolution team has promised to provide Windows binaries for each Evolution release. The last one they did is version 2.24.2 (which is quite recent). It is very important news, because so far Windows has been left in the cold, if we talk about quality of open source e-mail clients. Yes, there is Thunderbird, but it's still feels very immatured to me even after reaching 2.0. Sorry, but having to put signature in special .signature file doesn't cut the mustard1.

Anyway, availability of Evolution on Windows (and later on OS X, I hope) could change landscape of groupware offerings, because finally there would viable alternative to Outlook, which is still the king in Windows. My dream is to have CalDAV + Mail system (Postfix/Exim + Davecot) as easy replacement of Exchange system. Evolution have CalDAV support for Calendars for some time already, but there comes biggest news...

2. Thanks to Milan Crha, which was man who leaded my succesful attempts to provide first "official" patch to Evolution previously this year, have nailed and finally commited patches for supporting CalDAV VTODO (known as Tasks in Evo) and VNOTES (known as Memos) in Evolution. It gives me posibility to use DaviCAL server with Evolution and fully share my plans and tasks between work and home computers, and laptop too (I patched Evo in Hardy and Intrepid to do this). Yes, there are some rough edges, and stability sometimes suffers (without loss of information), but it is done - next stage is improvement of accounts (having one account to create in Evo and connect to all goodies of CalDAV). It's already improved my planning and scheduling so much that I really own Milan a bear (or whatever his favorite party trink is :)).

If we look back - when Novell went into some finansial troubles and formed strange partnership with Microsoft (which still bothers me time after time), I feared that it means end of Evolution as we know. Surprisingly, Novell not only countinue to provide superb support for Evolution, it also has worked with all contributors to change license to GPLv3 and also eased posibility for others to fix and improve Evo as they need (Milan works for Red Hat, for example). Yes, it has bugs, but I must say this - Evolution is a Firefox of open source groupwares. There are competition, but no one have came even close to deliver that much as it does.

Big thank you to you Evo guys, you really rock!

1 no hard feelings to Mozilla and Thunderbird teams. You still do your job and Thunderbird is still more popular than Evo. Keep improvements coming and maybe one day we will have nice competition between Thunderbird + Lighting and Evo.