Someone, who probably has no idea of what it takes to maintain a large codebase, suggested that Canonical/Ubuntu should fork Evolution. He also sensed a non-existing Microsoft conspiracy. These days we seem to hear more about conspiracies by evil corporations than about technology/user-needs ;-)
Interestingly, it has generated some replies from my engineering inspirations - NotZed and Fejj. Fejj's comments in the original post here. The reply blog post of NotZed, in his typical to-the-point-style here. (There is a section about India as well, which I found interesting to read)
For Enterprise Desktop users on Windows, Outlook is the single-most indispensable and attractive software, that slows/stops people from migrating to Linux. The reason why it has so many passionate users, is because MSFT invests a lot of people for this product development/QA. For Evolution to seamlessly replace Outlook, what it needs is not-a-fork but more-resources (people not resources like memory ;-)).
A saner and practically more useful suggestion, to Canonical, would have been, to sponsor for few programmers to work for Evolution; Just like how RedHat has increased their contribution to Evolution, in the last two years or so. Copyright assignment is a stop-energy. To make it is easier to contribute to Evolution, it is LGPL, for a while now.
There are people on Canonical who are far more business-aware than me, who will just laugh and ignore at this fork-suggestion. But this post and the replies rekindled some old memories and thus this post.
On an unrelated note, I believe IMAP4 has outlived its time. I wish to see something on the lines of reMAP to gain popularity and interest. A new, open protocol that is REST-driven, conversation-based, http-cacheable/shareable, internal-cloud-host-able etc.