<story><title>Brazilian government to ditch Microsoft in favour of bespoke email system</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/brazilian-government-to-ditch-microsoft-in-favour-of-bespoke-email-system-7000021929/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Theodores</author><text>If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications.&lt;p&gt;How hard is it to write an email client?&lt;p&gt;With some calendar?&lt;p&gt;Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible?&lt;p&gt;Wasn&amp;#x27;t gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don&amp;#x27;t think it took years or billions to get up and running.&lt;p&gt;I think you could have a tidy and secure webmail built by half a dozen people randomly chosen from Hacker News in six months. Sure it might not be as all singing and dancing as the oh-so-wonderful Microsoft Outlook but then again it might actually be better for the task in hand - facilitating communication for a government. Sometimes people have got to try rather than be all helpless. I am all for software re-use, open source and everything else deemed good software engineering, but, for a government wanting to keep their communications private some consideration has to be given to &amp;#x27;how hard can it be to write an email client?&amp;#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mseebach</author><text>&amp;gt; How hard is it to write an email client?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; With some calendar?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible?&lt;p&gt;Oh dearie. Thus began every single failed multi-million-dollar software project in the history of software.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Wasn&amp;#x27;t gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don&amp;#x27;t think it took years or billions to get up and running.&lt;p&gt;A: The feature-set of GMail as is released in 2004 is unlikely to impress someone used to Outlook&amp;#x2F;Exchange&lt;p&gt;B: What a correctly motivated Google-quality engineer can cook up in a few years (which is apparently how long GMail was in development before release) has little to no correlation to what a government can procure from a systems integrator. Also, I don&amp;#x27;t recall the calendar being worth much back them. Maybe, maybe, maybe if they hired Google-grade engineers, paid them Google salaries and gave them Google-freedom to work on this, they might be able to pull it off. But that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; harder than it sounds.&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; do something on its own about securing government communications&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not hard to secure an email installation - its interface to the internet at large is super small and well understood (SMTP). Most likely NSA grabs the mail they want from outside the installation by sniffing unencrypted network traffic.&lt;p&gt;A worthwhile effort, and one quite suitable for a government even, is to get people to encrypt their emails.</text></comment>
<story><title>Brazilian government to ditch Microsoft in favour of bespoke email system</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/brazilian-government-to-ditch-microsoft-in-favour-of-bespoke-email-system-7000021929/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Theodores</author><text>If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications.&lt;p&gt;How hard is it to write an email client?&lt;p&gt;With some calendar?&lt;p&gt;Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible?&lt;p&gt;Wasn&amp;#x27;t gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don&amp;#x27;t think it took years or billions to get up and running.&lt;p&gt;I think you could have a tidy and secure webmail built by half a dozen people randomly chosen from Hacker News in six months. Sure it might not be as all singing and dancing as the oh-so-wonderful Microsoft Outlook but then again it might actually be better for the task in hand - facilitating communication for a government. Sometimes people have got to try rather than be all helpless. I am all for software re-use, open source and everything else deemed good software engineering, but, for a government wanting to keep their communications private some consideration has to be given to &amp;#x27;how hard can it be to write an email client?&amp;#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vacri</author><text>Calendaring is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve. It sounds trivial, but the devil is in the details.</text></comment>