the notMac challenge

One of the things that most bugs me about Apple's current application suite is the linkage to the .Mac online tools. Every application has handy features that often will only work if you pay for a .Mac subscription. Great business idea, but for the extreme geek like myself, it's really annoying. I hate that they are the only option. Not only do I want somebody else, for a better price, I would really like to just host this myself. I'm enough of a geek that I can run this on my own existing server, and would really like to. I've looked at various howto's over the last couple of years that explain how to get elements of this to work, but most are quite difficult, and come at a heavy cost.

Well, I'm not the only one to feel this way, check out the notMac challenge Basically, it's a cash prize to create a .Mac alternative, that has a simple installer that anybody can use.
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