Filed under: Internet Tools, Open Source
Open source .Mac alternative?
This is pretty cool. Ubuntu, in case you haven't heard of it, is a flavor of Linux whose tagline is:
"Linux for Human Beings." In other words, it is meant to be easy to use by everybody. Some Ubuntu members are planning
on building a .Mac-Like service for Ubuntu that would offer Webmail,
Calendar, Address Book, News Reader, Public Homepage, and Blogging services along with a slew of other features for
free. This project has hardly started, but if it succeeds nicely in Linux land, it probably wouldn't be that difficult
to adapt to OS X, thanks to the open source underpinnings of both platforms.
A free version of .Mac that is scalable and usable by all? Sounds like heaven.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Laur said 12:51PM on 1-18-2006
I have a website. I have an email address. I *DO NOT* want to change those just because I want to start publishing my page through iWeb or my photos through iPhoto. I *DO* want to be able to use all this nice server-based synchronizing backup autopublishing goodness you are throwing at me. I have a lot more than 1GB of files (A lot more than .mac's maximum 4GB even) that I need to back up. Heck, my personal site has private photo/video galleries for my friends and family that are pushing 1GB! I'd be happy to pay you $99 for the privilege of RUNNING .MAC SERVICES ON MY OWN SERVERS. Or how about this: I pay you $99 a year to subscribe to yearly iLife updates along with receiving server-side stuff to run .mac?
What is on the headend of .mac that makes it so impossible to ship ".mac server" anyway? I'm sure Apple's implementation is quite complicated since it's handling so many users, but a workgroup or individual user implementation would not be all that complicated; it can't be. I can duplicate all .mac functionality except for some iSync stuff with a WebDAV share and some scripts. Duplicating .mac, however has the drawback of breaking everyone else's .mac stuff for me since it involves DNS tomfoolery. Apple not selling the head-end for this in some capacity is ridiculous.
It's reallly funny how people got so mad at Microsoft because they bundled Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, but the whole .mac thing is far far worse and pisses me off to no end. I want to use the service, but it's useless to me. I buy iLife every year because I like the new features. This year I bought an entire application I can barely do anything with! I am still bombarded by ads and annoyances throughout iLife and OS/X to buy this useless service.
Something's gotta give. Every time I talk about .mac I get madder than hell. Are you getting this, Apple?
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Joshua Ochs said 12:55PM on 1-18-2006
We'll see. I've seen lots of nice OSS projects that never got off the ground. Even if they do assemble a nice collection of services, you'll have to make sure that
a) All of the software that runs it is on your Mac - not always easy
b) It integrates with the OS the way dot-mac does
That second point is the most doubtful - it requires quite a bit of effort to redirect all of the dot-mac queries and such to your local machine. Even if you manage it, what's to prevent Apple's newest iLife feature (iWeb, photocasting, etc) from needing major updates to your homebrew dot-mac? Not to mention Apple is providing a heck of a lot more bandwidth, and *probably* more uptime than your home system.
Now, if by this they mean they're making it easy to host your own e-mail, web sites, webdav, that's different. That's standard hosting. That's not dot-mac.
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teece said 12:59PM on 1-18-2006
While I really like the idea, and the implementation could be done in open source and for free, I see no way the service could be completely free.
Who's gonna pay for the bandwidth and server space? I guess maybe they could get something set up, but I'm skeptical.
(Of course, Ubuntu and Debian et al. already have a bunch of bandwidth and server space that they manage for free, but I don't really see that extending to users. Currently, those things are for developers, really.)
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teece said 1:02PM on 1-18-2006
Wait, so this is meant to be dropped in on some already existing server with bandwidth? Meh. Color me uninterested, then. In that case, it's just a wrapper around a bunch of already existing open source products.
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Joshua Ochs said 1:05PM on 1-18-2006
Christ John, if you want the service, buy it. If you don't think it's worth the money, then don't. The only reason this is such a religious war is because it was briefly offered for free.
Does your home Mac run WebObjects? Do you have redundant systems? Are the vast majority of people going to know how to set up a domain name, get a static IP, and all of that? Sure, you and I do. We're a tiny, tiny minority. You're a very vocal fraction of that tiny minority. Name one good business reason for Apple to expend the effort creating such a package and marketing and supporting it. Good luck.
Macs are about things just working. Possibly for a price premium, but it's all about "it just works". Dot-mac just works. Running your own server and the BS associated doesn't fit into this equation anywhere.
Now, the idea of offering an iLife/dot-mac yearly subscription bundle for $99, that's a heck of a lot nicer, especially if you're not using all of the features of the two packages.
(Oh, and a couple final nits - keep your current e-mail - nothing says you have to use dot-mac's e-mail. And the backup software works with disks and CD/DVD's, not just to your iDisk, although that's an agonizingly slow and stupid option if you have the standard 512Kbps upload speed most providers give you.)
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Jeff said 1:36PM on 1-18-2006
John-
With all due respect, I understand your frustration, however, I don't believe it is the intention of .Mac to be all things to all people. I am a former .Mac subscriber but recently cancelled my subscription because I quickly "outgrew" the need for it. IMO, .Mac is scalable to the degree it was designed to be.
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Scott said 2:14PM on 1-18-2006
While .mac is good for some people (families, non-techie sorts), people who are technically inclined will quickly exceed its usefulness. For example, why can't someone write an app that captures those .mac requests and funnels the apps to a different service. Like ftp'ing pictures (or even putting them on flickr), or using your own dedicated webserver or hosting account. I know because of business, i have my own dedicated box. I'd rather host on that. Its not really a "i hate .mac and it should be free" thing, just that the value of it is seriously deminished for me. And Apple seems to integrate more and more stuff with it, so it gets kind of irritating because all the "cool" functionality is only for .mac.
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Josh S. said 2:47PM on 1-18-2006
While it's not worth it for Apple or most people to do what John suggests, I wouldn't dismiss all his comments.
.Mac is very useful for many people and is worth the money. What bothers me and I think also bothers John, is that many of Apple's applications that are designed for everyone, will only allow you to use the extra functions if you subscribe to .Mac. It just seems to me like a way to force more subscribers. They could offer many the same functions (Photocasts, iWeb publishing) for both .Mac and regular websites.
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Brady J. Frey said 2:51PM on 1-18-2006
I'd agree with John, actually. Locking us into .Mac without the flexibility of using our own server has been a huge annoyance.
.Mac on your own server, or on a company server, could be a huge Exchange server competitor -- bridging the problems with Address Book sharing alone (LDAP address book sharing sucks).
In the end, though, the big problem is we need ical and address book and email to be better integrated for work collaboration -- with a way to integrate on the server that's not a hack.
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Brady J. Frey said 2:53PM on 1-18-2006
As Joshua said:
"Name one good business reason for Apple to expend the effort creating such a package and marketing and supporting it. Good luck."
Because they want the enterprise market, and xserve is a good tool for that. Allowing Tiger server to grow and become an inhouse server just put them neck and neck with Exchange as a viable solution. That's big money in the corporate world.
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John Laur said 3:41PM on 1-18-2006
Just to clarify I'm not asking for .mac for free. I never used it when it was free in the first place. Hosting things costs money and the price of .mac for most people is more than fair. However, I'd pay a heck of a lot of money to be able to run it on my own machines. I'll guarantee you that I'd pay Apple more for a server product than they would make selling me .mac for 5 years even at the $200/yr 4GB rate.
To Joshua's questions: Well no, my home macs aren't running webservers and WebObjects but I'm not sure that's relevant. If WebObjects and an xserver are required to run a .mac-alike server, that's fine with me. I feel that if Apple were to ship such a product it would be beneficial to them to author the personal/workgroup server-side product in a more commonly used language such as PHP (which I hate too btw) so that it could be deployed on a wide variety of environments. And yes, the servers I run are configured for high availability and complete redundancy. Entire machines are standing by as hot spares. I would even go so far as to suggest that if I ran my own .mac service, it would be more available than Apple's what with their tendancies to take things down for hours at a time during keynote speeches and the like.
Others: Yes, I know "backup" can use external firewire drives and DVD's. But I have a hundred gigs to back up. I don't want to burn 30 DVD's and I don't want to search for my external hard drive every day in order to do an incremental backup. I could buy retrospect, but I honestly think the Apple software is going to be faster and easier for me to use as a personal solution. Where is the WebDAV backup target in Backup? Oh yeah, I forgot, the app fully supports the extremely useful feature of backing up to a WebDAV share so long as it's .mac!
I will reenterate that it wouldn't be so bad if these buttons weren't staring me in the face every time I click the menu in Finder to connect to a network share and see iDisk staring me in the face -- or the .mac preference pane that I can only make go away with a hack.. or the photocast button in iPhoto.. or the application icon for iWeb.
Maybe I'm too vocal about it. I guess I should just shut up and give Apple another hundred bucks for no other reason than my software will stop nagging me about it.
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Denny Butts said 4:17PM on 1-18-2006
I am in the exact same boat as a few of you. I have my own dedicated box, and never had a .Mac account.
It's never appealed to me to pay $99 to just put up a photo gallery, email and some simple web pages. I have most of those features on my own box with tons of bandwidth and disc space for just a bit more money.
Here's the catch, each year, I get closer and closer to dropping the $99 to get a .Mac account for all the new toys that keep getting integrated into iLife.
I think this is great and I think Apple should keep it up. There are tons of little things in the Apple Experience that I am missing out on, because of my knowledge and resources. It's just some great things that would "just work" that keep me interested.
I don't think the service should be free, but like the idea of a yearly subscription / iLife deal. It's possible if that was an option, I would sign up now. But there's no reason for Apple to loose out on the money, seeing I am so close to buying both.
Scott, WOW! What a great idea. But that would ruin their model of driving you to a .Mac account. I think there's a flickr plug in for iPhoto. It's still a cool idea to have you iLife funnel things to other services.
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Andrew Montgomery said 2:05AM on 1-19-2006
Wait, back to this "Ubuntu" thing. I saw that C.K. had translated the Ubuntu tag line from "Linux for Human Beings" and came up with: Linux which is "meant to be easy to use by everyone". Now, I've never heard of Ubuntu. I don't travel in many circles that bump up too firmly against Linux. So my first wise-ass remark was "If these guys can't even pick a *name* that is easy to use, how could they *possibly* make an operating system that is easy to use?" A fair point. And a lot funnier if you toss in the f-word like I did when I said it out loud to my roommate who wasn't listening. In fact, it was such a good point that I really had to find out for myself if C.K. had translated this rather banal tag line in the spirit that it had been intended. So I followed his link and found this:
"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.
It then goes on to say:
"The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit."
Where is the part where the Ubuntu community makes Linux easy to use? Am I missing something?
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MSpreij said 12:30PM on 1-19-2006
Andrew,
"Where is the part where the Ubuntu community makes Linux easy to use? Am I missing something?"
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ still states "Linux for Human Beings", and it has quite a few more than, oh, 3 paragraphs. See the press releases, the About, Philosophy..
"Now, I've never heard of Ubuntu. I don't travel in many circles that bump up too firmly against Linux."
That explains, really..
See http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity
(Well. I think I just made a few fair points, really. Yes, I agree with myself. ;-)
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