Quote:
Originally Posted by dishe
gTen, I hear what you are saying and I WANT to agree with you. But sadly, my experiences have not matched up with what you describe. And I think you've missed my point.
I'm not glued to Microsoft, for the record. I would gladly switch to ANYTHING that worked just as well. I used Funambol extensively (even had a correspondence with its creator, Fabrizio- I actually have a picture I took with him somewhere... heh). I was a big fan and pushed it everywhere before I gave in and got myself an Exchange server.
My practical experience in the real world has often been the complete opposite of your perfect-world vision. Not all the time, I do love open-source, and have had excellent experiences with some of the resulting products. However, not everything labelled "open source" is magically awesome.
Open Office, for example, had compatibility problems when collaborating with high-profile clients glued to MS Office. One could argue that it was Microsoft in fact who was not adhering to their own standards set forth for the document types. Whatever the case may be, to avoid embarassing situations, I ended up caving in and getting myself Office 07.
I used to sound just like you... I was a fan of Funambol, and pushed it every chance I got... until I noticed I was always making up excuses for everything where I shouldn't have had to. It didn't always push in real time (try explaining that to a Blackberry user) and I had a few bizarre circumstances in which I ended up with duplicate entries and the like which was a headache to resolve. SyncML is great, again, in concept. Exchange? A world of difference. At the risk of sounding like Apple advertising, "it just works".
I agree with you in principle, things should be more open. I don't want to rely on Microsoft. And there SHOULD also be alternatives for the things I mentioned missing in Android. But sometimes there aren't (good call on the unrar tool, though!).
If you read over my point in the first post, you'll see that I admit this stuff will come out sooner or later, so many of my gripes are temporary. But right now, Android is not quite there yet.
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Oh I don't disagree that Exchange is a lot simpler then running funambol or other sync clients. Even in my installation of Funambol I had to modify it to my needs to get it to work properly and their documentation is pretty bad...
One problem that happens in open source communities is when open source is done by a profit business they try to keep a difference between the "paid" version and "free" version. Let me use zimbra as an example..their free does not include things like mobile sync and real time backups. In turn this makes a struggle between open source people and the company. (which is why they got crappy mobile sync)
M$ in my opinion is the worst at sticking to standards. But what makes open source apealing is when I have a custom solution I can modify the code myself to make it fit my needs a lot easier on open source platforms.