We Need to Talk About the State of Calendar Software on Desktop

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person using Evolution. For the most part it just stays out of my way for what I use it for[1] and it has great support for all the online services I use. It seems to never come up in online discussions of e-mail or calendar software though, unless I bring it up myself.

1: Just e-mail, contacts, and calendar. It has support for "tasks" and "memos" as well, but I haven't used those.

This post started of really well and then fell pray to classic "developer mindset" of picking a technology to build on before even coming up product requirements.

After identifying that people are willing to pay money for good software on Mac, finding a funding model that leads to sustainable software seems a more important goal than whether it is open source. I bet that 90% of the reason web based calendar software is miles better than desktop is because it is locked away behind a sustainable stream of funding.

This "everything should be open source" thing is starting to trump building useful software that is created by good designers, that you know, want to be paid. To the point where people are willing to take VC funding with vague business plans (Astral, Zed) instead of, I don't know, making people pay for the fucking product they are getting.

WRT the article itself, I think the author fails to acknowledge one foundational asspect of free software: it's written by people/organizations who want to _use it_ not necessarily sell it.

This is really the same question of: why are giant public school systems paying many millions of $ per year for algebra and chemistry textbooks?

This is the modern workflow in which all high level tasks are really some form of going shopping.

In terms of s/w, an example would be UCSD, which has one of the most prestigous CS programs in the US, and pays M$ to host their email?

It may not be glamorous, but if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Paying for a product, instead of creating it, because it's "boring" is not good financial strategy. Although it is widespread, almost ubiquitous.

As a Linux (and Mac) user, I had the same feelings for a long time, until I joined a large corporation that heavily relies on Microsoft stuff.

So just speaking as a user: Outlook is the crappiest email client on the planet, but it’s the best calendar I have seen so far. I haven’t been able to replicate with OSS, what I experience now in this corporate environment. Everything just works and is well integrated. I can easily see availabilities of co-workers before inviting them to meetings. I can easily share certain aspects of my own calendar with some or all co-workers (only availability, titles, full event content). I can hand my calendar over to be managed by someone else and it will be clear that I did so (A invited you on behalf of B).

All these things just work.

I applaud the work to start a good OSS calendar implementation, but what I‘m actually missing is a corresponding OSS server side that does all these things I‘ve seen in the enterprise.

As some others here have pointed out, this blog post somehow ignores the fact that some Linux desktop apps have supported online calendars from all the sources they mention (CalDAV, Google calendars, NextCloud, webcal, and probably Exchange/Outlook) for many years, such as the Evolution app (and any frontend app using Evolution's backend, such as GNOME Calendar and probably some others). GNOME Online Accounts also exposes at least some of those account types. KDE's "Kalendar" supports all of these types of online calendars too.

As the author laments, Mac users have no shortage of great desktop calendaring apps (and if you're not happy with Apple Calendar already, you have to _pay_ for a fancier third-party app? Oh no, the humanity!)

On the Windows side, from what I've seen there's also a pretty good "Windows Calendar" app that comes bundled with Windows 10/11 (I'm sure there are other apps out there too, but anyway those who really "live in their calendars" on Windows are most likely already spending their days in Outlook and the whole MS enterprise workflow anyway). I'd guess that the exceedingly few people out there doing calendaring across different desktop platforms are doing just fine with their web calendar or Thunderbird.

Ok, so what is the problem again? If the remaining core of their argument is that there is no perfect open source app "better than Thunderbird's calendar" on all three major desktop platforms, that's a pretty unreasonably high bar and burden to set for open source developers.

The author's rant then morphs into a pitch for writing a whole new calendaring app with a shiny new framework instead of improving one of the existing apps... and in the end, they include this mention in the concluding paragraph:

> "if the spirit of benevolence (or frustration) moves you enough, send a grant my way — I’ll take on the herculean task of writing this mythical software myself."

I see the author has a Ph.D, so seeking grants and looking for "perfect solutions" is possibly pretty deeply ingrained into their way of thinking... but the world does not need yet another incomplete project that will fizzle out shortly after the author realizes the sheer magnitude of the problem space and burns out (or runs out of grant money).

What we need is contributors to existing projects, not NIH lone wolves with an "architecture astronaut" mindset.