[Cosmo-dev] Re: [Scooby-dev] Cosmo/Scooby Merge (Please read and comment)

[Ted Leung]

Brian has already addressed a number of these points in his recent  
messages but I thought I'd back him up for a change ;-)

I personally don't see the point of having the two projects be  
separate and having Scooby communicate with Cosmo via CalDAV, for  
many of the reasons that Brian mentioned.   I do think that the needs  
of the Chandler ecosystem need to be our top priority in the beta  
time frame.   But I don't see the needs of the Chandler ecosystem to  
be in conflict with support for standards.    In order for the  
ecosystem to be successful, Cosmo/Scooby must support as high a  
degree of interoperability as possible.   I know that it is  
fashionable to equate interoperability with open standards, but there  
are plenty of open standards which are so poorly implemented as to be  
a joke.    Having served as a foot soldier in the open standards/open  
implementation wars around XML and XML Schema, I am personally not  
interested in being pedantically correct with respect to a particular  
RFC or W3C Recommendation as a top priority.   I want to see our  
users have the best possible experience.  That means innovatiive  
functionality, good performance, and interoperability with other  
desktop and web clients.

The implementation of open standards certainly has a role to play in  
facilitating interoperability, which is why I don't think that there  
is a conflict here.    But I think that we should also bear in mind  
that CalDAV is just one of the many protocols (proprietary or not)  
that we will need to support.   Back in May <http:// 
wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/ 
SharingFormatMeeting20060510>  Brian articulated a vision of Cosmo as  
a data storage hub with adaptors for many protocols including  
CalDAV.    I fully agreed with that vision and I don't see that  
integrating Scooby and Cosmo takes anything away from that vision,  
other that possibly rearranging some of the scheduling.   If  
anything, the goals that we have for the ecosystem will ultimately  
demand a much higher support for interoperation than just a reference  
CalDAV server.   If nothing else, our user community and the  
marketplace will demand it.

Ted