[sf-lug] Great News: IBM, Novell join forces

[Rick Moen]

Quoting phillip tribble (phillip.tribble at gmail.com):

> "During a press briefing at LinuxWorld today in San Francisco, IBM announced
> a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical to offer
> "Microsoft-free" personal computers with IBM's Lotus Notes and Lotus
> Symphony software. 

(Disclaimer:  I've never used Lotus Notes, and haven't seen Symphony
since DOS days.)

As late as 2002, I used to hear a lot about Lotus Notes and the IBM
Domino servers that go with them.  Managers seemed to like it as a
do-it-all "collaborative application platform".  Technical users and
sysadmins seemed to uniformly hate it with a searing passion.  I've
seldom seen anything like that -- and am sure I've heard nothing about
it for half a decade -- until now.

Symphony, on the other hand, has been not just obscure but actually
dead, around the end of the '80s,/ early '90s.

What's now being called [IBM] Lotus Symphony is a completely new and
unrelated product having nothing to do with the historical product --
and originated as IBM Workplace (2002-2006).  It seems to be a Java
thing.