In any case, on with the contenders…

Yoga
The most openly Notes-challenging project is Yoga, the brainchild of Paul Matthews. In fact, even the name is derived from Lotus (as in the position). An early and raw version was released on December 1998 and is available from the Yoga home page at http://samba.anu.edu.au/gnuotes/.

Yoga started off a victim of some of the early Java hype, as a 100% Java application. Yoga was later reimplemented as the performance of Java became a problem. Yoga's now a mixture of C++ and Python (a common scripting language on Unix platforms).

As I mentioned earlier, the stewardship of one champion tends to drive forward open source projects. However, the individual leadership of such projects can be a serious liability. In this case, the Yoga program has been on hold for several months due to Paul Matthews' lack of free time. If you want to find out more, try the Yoga mailing list, where archives of previous discussions are public, at http://lists.samba.org/listproc/gnuotes/. Even if you're not interested in a Notes alternative, the list makes great reading as a way to learn more about how much work it really is to create something Notes-like.

Casbah
Next up is Casbah, given its name in honor of the Bazaar development method it shares. Casbah's designed to be (take a deep breath) an application development, Web server, email, discussion group, calendaring and scheduling, content management, personal organizer groupware product. Sound familiar? The project is led by Niel Bornstein and Kendall Clark, and the Casbah homepage is at http://ntlug.org/casbah/.

The outline design has been in place for about a year. The project has been broken down into modules with more exotic names -- Natroun, Qibla, Oriel, Shariff, Cairo, and Gamora. The role of the Domino server is taken by Cairo, and as with the preview process of Notes Designer, a client may have its own mini-Cairo server to run scripts and serve Web pages.

Casbah is modeled not only after Notes but also after Lifestreams, a hypermedia content organizer from David Gelertner's company Mirror Worlds Technologies. Unfortunately, David Gelertner's name is somewhat well-known for another reason as well: he was one of the Unibomber's victims. Fortunately, Gelertner survived (see http://www.wired.com/news/news/wiredview/story/7560.html for an interesting interview). Aspects of Lifestreams (at http://www.lifestreams.com/) may also find their way into Lotus' own product over time.

GNU Gather
Last of all is GNU Gather, formerly known as PINN and, before that, Mediator. Note that, like Yoga, GNU Gather is promoted under the banner of GNU (short for GNU's Not Unix). Let's stop for a minute to discuss GNU.

The GNU Project (at http://www.gnu.org) was one of the very earliest proponents of free software. In fact, GNU was an early UNIX clone, although Linux really reached many of the desired goals set early on by GNU. Richard Stallman wrote "Why I must write GNU" as part of his GNU Manifesto: