Rant ends and praise continues for open source software

Synovel Technologies have released a product called Spicebird which is exactly what I was looking for and ranting that it was not available as an open source alternative. I tried it out and think Spicebird has great potential. It of course needs some tweaking but is definitely a step in the right direction of integrating email and calendar services. It is built on Thunderbird and Lightning. Kudos to the developers at Synovel. I am also happy that this company is based in India. Please keep up your good work.

Go ahead, download it and have fun!

A rare rant about open software

Let me make it clear in the beginning: "I am a big fan of open source software". Having said that here is my rant.

I have been looking into the open source options for a calendar and todo list management software. My requirements were:

• Integrated with a mail client
  
• Calendar and ToDo list
  
• Automatic syncing capability
  
• Ability to handle multiple calendars
  

I thought this is a minimal set of requirements that any decent calender software would satisfy. To my dismay, I couldn't find any software that could do it out of the box. A solution was to use a collection of multiple software. Unfortunately, nothing that I could find was even workable. One that came close was the following: Use a combination of Lightning, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and Google provider. But this does not have bi-directional task management.

I am annoyed at Google for not having a ToDo list in their calendar. How difficult can it be to add this and why leave it out in the first place?

This is one of the rare cases where open source software is devoid of common sense. The open source community is capable of much more and we should not settle for so little!

Do you know of a better alternative? Please let me know if you do.