Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Steve O'Hara-Smith
Date : Thu Sep 29 2005 04:15 pm

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:49:37 GMT
Randy Howard <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> wrote:

> Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote
> (in article <20050929082224.705a2f9a.steveo@eircom.net>):
> 
> > On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 08:58:42 +0100
> > "Joe Butler" <ffffh.no.spam@hotmail-spammers-paradise.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Perhaps you could give an example of a closed source application that "makes
> >> it a lot more difficult to switch [to another] vendor [compared to the open
> >> source version]"
> > 
> > 	Microsoft Outlook.
> 
> Thunderbird does a fantastic job of sucking email and contacts 
> out of outlook .pst files.  It also works cross-platform since 

	True - but AFAICT it is the *only* application that manages
this trick for recent versions of Outlook and Outlook Express. I
have been meaning to look into how it pulls this off.

	Now consider the Exchange/Outlook calendar and related stuff,
once you have a medium size organisation hooked into it for all their
meeting schedules and so forth there's more than just email to worry
about.

> their file structure is the same on other platforms, such as OS 
> X.  I did this recently, the one hangup going permanently off of 
> the Windows box was about a <massive> pst file. 

	I used it to get my office mail out from Outlook and under
Sylpheed on BSD.

....

> Considering how broken MS software is, this process is pretty 
> darn painless. 

	:)

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