Ximian Connector for Mac OS X

We are interested in seeing a version of Ximian Connector for Mac OS X. Ximian Connector is an extension to Ximian Evolution, a email and personal information manager similar to Microsoft Outlook, that allows Evolution users to connect to Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers, just as Outlook users can. The product is described at http://www.ximian.com/products/connector/ .

Most of the Ximian company's software is open source, and most of it, including the Gnome desktop management suite, has been ported to run on MacOS X with the help of an additional X-Windows server program. This isn't as good as running the software natively in OSX's Aqua display manager, but the fact that it allows a huge number of software packages to work at all is valuable to many users, and so a very good starting point.

With the help of a software package manager like Fink, installing Evolution is as simple as typing "fink install evolution" and letting the package manager find, build, and install all needed dependencies, including X11 and Gnome. Once Fink is installed and set up, the effort to do this is minimal. The effort is slight enough for most users to be able to take advantage of right now, and in fact many users are already using Gnome and Evolution on their Macintoshes with the help of these package management systems.

Ximian's one proprietary product is Connector. Without it, Evolution can emulate many of the features of Microsoft Outlook, but it cannot take advantage of the shared collaboration features that Exchange provides to Outlook users. Being proprietary, Connector cannot currently be distributed with Fink or other package managers. We need Ximian to take the initiative to port Connector themselves, and we understand that they are unlikely to do so unless they can charge money for the product and get a profitable return for the effort.

We believe that, if enough potential paying users show an interest, we can show Ximian that there is a market for Connector on OSX, even though it would require installing Evolution, X11 and anything else these depend upon. We believe that, if enough people are interested in using this, pre-packaged software suites will emerge, and perhaps Evolution could itself be ported to Aqua. But in the here & now, a user that wanted to do so can use most Ximian software, with the major exception of Connector, and we belive that this piece of software would be worth paying for, both by individuals and by organizations looking to avoid the high cost of putting a fully licensed Office installation on each desktop computer.

If you agree, please join our petition. Thank you.