Evolution was developed by open-source company Ximian, which was acquired by Novell in August 2003. It's widely seen as a possible threat to Outlook due to its ability to integrate well with Microsoft's Exchange server.
Tor Lillqvist, Novell senior software engineer, revealed the latest development in his blog posting yesterday. He is realistic about Evolution's current capabilities, saying it crashes immediately after launching. However, the application's ability to run on Windows means serious debugging work can begin, he added.
Lillqvist is part of an open-source project that aims to bring Evolution -- which encompasses e-mail, calendaring tasks and contact management -- to the Windows platform.
In an earlier blog, he laid out the Evolution-on-Windows development path drawn from his speech at a recent open source GNOME desktop conference in Germany.
According to Lillqvist, since Evolution depends on various software libraries from GNOME, porting is more difficult compared with other efforts such as the GIMP -- an image editor similar to Adobe Photoshop -- that only utilised core GIMP Toolkit (GTK) libraries on which GNOME depends.
Lillqvist said he will attempt to fix the base functionality of the application and refine it later.
He warned interested parties to keep at arm's length from the software development effort for the time being, adding: "You cannot run Evolution on Windows yet ... there isn't anything for end-users to beta-test yet."
My first reaction upon reading this was the following:
"Given the ease of use of today's GNU/Linux systems, I just don't see the point. Any outfit that buys computers already has MS Windows (and usually some version of MS Office) pre-installed on it. Outlook (Lookout?) is included in all versions of MS Office."
Upon further reflection, though, I think it is a good idea, for the same reasons that the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and the Mozilla products were ported to Win32. If we can give them something that looks "just like Outlook," then there's no longer a reason to purchase MS Office (there is already an FOSS app that reads MS Access databases). I think it will help us to transition folks to Free platforms.