Oracle and the Mozilla Foundation are keeping a joint venture under wraps, leading to speculation that the database giant may by planning to release an open-source product.
The Mozilla Foundation revealed in February at the Free and Open Source Developers" European Meeting (FOSDEM) that the database giant had hired three people to work on Mozilla Lightning. This project, which aims to integrate Mozilla"s calendar application, Sunbird, with its e-mail application, Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook. Despite repeated requests over the last two months, Oracle has been unable to provide ZDNet UK with a representative to speak about its work on the Lightning project. The Mozilla Foundation itself directed inquiries on the issue back to Oracle.