Now, to be clear, I am not attacking Funambol. Rather, I'm pointing out the fact that obvious economics have forced this project to cater to everyone but the most obvious market needing a ready solution. This may lead users to seek out a very worthwhile, be it entirely too geeky, project known as SyncEvolution.
SyncEvolution is a fantastic application used by those who are comfortable with a CLI (command line interface). Those of us that are not system administrators, however, find it to be terribly ineffective as a market entrance tool for mobile sync on Linux. That said, anyone wishing to make it work better is welcome to do so ... yet no one from the mobile industry has done anything with it? Why? All it needs is a little polish in the GUI department. Perhaps at this point we need to consider that blaming project leaders for creating and supporting exactly what they intended to provide serves no one. Instead, I think we need to come to expect more from the mobile industry as a whole. Clearly, they should be held with a higher level of responsibility here as they have blatantly refused to support Linux users at every turn.
Most of the tools are already built
RIM, Nokia, and others have some tremendous benefits already put into play for them, thanks to work from the open source development community. Mobile Linux is a great example of this. And to an equal degree, the tools are also in place for these companies to support their Linux using customers.
Yet despite all of this, today's mobile manufacturers do nothing to try to provide support for their customers using the Linux desktop platform. And that is not even the worst of it -- there is already a very strong proof of concept that could be built off of. Its name is Genesis.
Enter Genesis
The idea was a simple one -- take an otherwise solid back-end for syncing mobile devices and make it vastly simpler for the end user. From this, Genesis was born. Based on the belief that syncing a mobile device should not require years of Linux CLI experience, the creator of the humble program has done a lot more than merely provide a solution to those willing to use it. This individual has also managed to make large mobile companies look pretty silly when they to this day exclaim that it would take entirely too much work to create a program that provided the same level of functionality of Genesis.
The downside is that the user must still do all of the backwards editing of config files to get things working on the SyncEvolution side of things, as this is what Genesis works with. The casual user is simply not going to find this acceptable, as other modern operating systems will not require this sort of thing. Sadly, we cannot expect everyone else to pick up the slack here. While both SyncEvolution and Genesis are part of the larger solution, we still need easier integration from mobile phone manufacturers. If they simply bothered to support the OTA options, along with their bundled-a-plenty Windows software that they load down onto CD, it would mean the following things would happen instantly:
Considering most desktop Linux users likely use mobile phones, these existing customers would be in a position to provide a stronger customer loyalty to the vendor with enough sense to support their platform.
With all of the new phones being released using Linux these days, providing OTA capabilities now vs. later would put that vendor instantly ahead of the curve.
And finally, vendors providing OTA sync solutions would find that monetizing this effort would not be difficult at all by simply taking existing open source server solutions such as Funambol, adding a small monthly fee, then providing basic support in the form of a ticketing system.
Story courtesy of Intranet Journal
