The Mozilla community has just released Sunbird 0.2, the first official release. This is a very big deal, a free Calendar program that will run on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system. This is from the same community that wrote the Firebird browser and Thunderbird email client, so we can only expect a high quality product that works according to standards.

Some of you may wonder why this matters? Until recently, there hasn’t been a good open source calendar program that is cross platform. I see most people using Microsoft Outlook, Palm Pilot Software, or some other proprietary package. These packages do many things in a non standard way, Sunbird would be based on established standards (the open iCal standard). This will allow for better flexility, intergration and keep you from being locked into a closed solution.

I see great opportunity with Mozilla Sunbird, I may be able to write my web services software to integrate with it. Once this becomes possible, other developers like me will be able to provide some very high quality solutions for small to medium sized businesses.