Novell Dumps the Hula Project

asv108 writes, "On the Hula general mailing list today, it was announced that Novell is no longer providing full-time developers to Hula. While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange. The Hula project was announced in February 2005 with much fanfare."

No full time developers

So then are they providing twice as many part-time developers?

Come to think of it, is there such a thing as part-time developers?

salt/wound?

Why do I detect the feeling of salt poured into an open wound?

Re:salt/wound?

Looks like Microsoft money helps ward off competing developers as well. Novell sold out - plain and simple.

Novell could have gotten large cash infusions, but instead they let Microsoft intimidate them. This is just plain wrong.

It's pretty obvious what happened from the timing of the event. I'm certain we'll see more of this in the future.

Apparently it was easier for Microsoft to buy off Novell than to fund SCO.

Re:salt/wound?

to everyone: it's about connections, stupid. connections (communication) between people is the most important thing we do, and it is why the Internet is important.

Exchange is the MS communications gateway, allowing people to connect on MS the proprietary platform with the single most popular online communication tool.

An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft.

Now, only days after a deal between MS and Novell, the open source project to build an exchange alternative is hurt by Novell removing support.

No theories needed here, just look at the facts.

Oh, come on

the open source project to build an exchange alternative Theres like, 5 different projects trying to achieve the Holy Grail of replacing Exchange. And Hula was far from the leader of the pack.

Re:Oh, come on

Is HULA the same as Netware OpenExchange (SLOX) and its open source deriv?

No, completely different. Hula comes from Novell NetMail. SLOX came from SuSE.

Re:Oh, come on

Could it just be that Novell found themselves with two projects aiming to achieve the same goal, and figured the suse one was better to concentrate their development effort on?

Re:salt/wound?

>An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft. This comment was so insightful it motivated me to create a Slashdot account just to say so.

Re:salt/wound?

This is absolutely correct. I have seen more UNIX/Linux shops closed because of the need for integrated mail, documents and calenders then for any other reason. First the execs demand mail, then calender, then wonder why they are paying for both Windows and Linux support... then Linux support goes bye bye, and the microsoft lock in factor hits.

Re:salt/wound?

You've never used Exchange, have you? Exchange is more like email, calendar, mailing lists, newsgroups, project planning, address book, and collaboration software integrated into one fairly solid package. It's an excellent product, and there is nothing out there that even comes close to being able to replace it.

Re:salt/wound?

but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have that are the killer to migrating away from it. All the office apps, sharepoint, Active directory, all expect to tie back to an Exchange server and simply have no other way to use the "must have" collaboration tools without it. That's the deviousness of Microsoft.. all sorts of other apps that use MS development tools like .Net expect to tie to MS tools. Many third party apps use that "one piece" you've got no control over when it MUST run a special machine custom for your industry.

I'm not knocking the OSS solution, not at all, but the "Exchange" problem isn't JUST an email server.. it's all the third party stuff all over the company that just assumes you've got Microsoft... In many cases you've got no way (profitable) to chase down all those loose ends... and when you finally DO, some middle manager pulls in ANOTHER must have app you have to fight over.

What's needed is more SOLUTIONS and not just pieces. The modularity of OSS is a strength and a weakness. The strength is in rapid integration of modules.. the weakness is the problem that every geek expects THEIR favorite module to work with every other module... we need to start thinking in STACKS of features rather than individual apps. The issue for geeks is that their favorite apps may not end up in the same feature "stack"... in order to round out the feature set easily without duplication. I think Google building it's own apps helps break the "must have MS" syndrome.. but Google's stuff is still their own.. and much doesn't translate to something that's feature COMPLETE in OSS right now. That's the next step for Linux distros.... to offer turnkey solutions, and not just parts. Ubuntu is on the right track, but they're not nearly ambitious enough at promoting STACKS of functions "ready to go"... but the users in the forums are definately on the right track... witness Automatix. Now do that for domain/email/groupware setup and you'll have something interesting for business.

Re:salt/wound?

that doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

I know for a fact A and B are unrelated - I work for Novell and wanted to get on the Hula project. It's been dead for months, even before the MS/Novell deal.

Re:salt/wound?

... I work for Novell ...

No wonder you post anonymously.

Re:salt/wound?

That conspiracy theory, while entertaining, is just totally untrue.

The Hula team decided not to go forward with the project because the project wasn't working. It had been nearly two years since we launched Hula and during that time a lot of other people entered the space (Zimbra, Google Calendar, etc) and implemented many of the innovative things that we had planned to do with Hula. This took some of the wind out of our sails, and we had some execution problems too; I don't know if you've noticed, but the project has essentially gone two years without a release, and if you've ever done any significant software development before, you know that's not a sign of a healthy project.

Now, there is some great work in Hula and we sincerely hope that some of it will be useful to the community. The AJAX-based dragonfly web interface for mail and calendar is gorgeous and open source and could be turned into a nice replacement for SquirrelMail or the other web mail/calendar interfaces. The Hula store and the former NetMail agent code are also both open source and other companies are using them now as well.

The guys who worked on this stuff (Jacob Berkman, Peter Teichman, Dave Camp, Cyrus Dolph, Rodney Price, and others) are extremely bright guys, did fabulous work, and really enjoyed the project -- but unfortunately it's one of those things that didn't work out the way everyone hoped. So it goes.

Novell customers of NetMail and GroupWise and other products can rest assured that they are unaffected and will be supported and carried forward -- I'm sure Novell will have things to say about that, so stay tuned.

Re:salt/wound?

I was very excited about Hula when it was first announced. I quickly became less enthusastic until I discovered Zimbra, which I have been using since Beta 1 days (it's not version 4.5RC1).

As far as the microsoft angle goes, I don't think it is nearly as open and shut as that. Hula had a variety of problems that were difficult to overcome. Almost all of those problems are centered around the underly platform.

• There is always a question of building on top of the existing stack, or replacing the stack. Hula choose to replace the stack rather then build on top of industry standards
• Hula's C++ mail server duplicates sendmail and postfix. That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail and postfix and replace it with buggy and possibly insecure mail. That's a problem.
• That stack also had a proprietary web server. You loose all the work in apache and tomcat.
• Your new code in on python? Look I know that Python is a pretty piece of work, but it is not something that clients are going to get excited about supporting. Open source means you eat your own dogfood, and very few companies are willing to find python experts to support their mail platform.
  

Anyone who thinks that Hula had any kind of momentum at all before this announcement is ignoring the fundamental architectural problems that killed the project months and months ago. Something may emerge from the ashes. Zimbra has proven it can be done, but it will have to be a firefox to this convoluted and bloated Mozilla.

Coincidence? I think not

Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with that decision?

Re:Coincidence? I think not

Nah, it's a completely independent decision having nothing to do with their new Redmond overlords.

How weird, my nose is growing.

Re:Competition?

I wonder if there is a non-competition clause in the recent agreement.

Right. In other news, Novell is getting out of the operating system, virtualization, and identity management businesses. In a press release, Novell states, "We got tired of selling actual software that does stuff."

Re:Coincidence? I think not

Yes, because Microsoft was seriously on the verge of having Hula overtake Exchange.

Yes, that's sarcasm.

I liked Hula, or at least the idea of it, but there are quite a few of these sorts of applications around, I don't find any of them quite satisfying, and I doubt Hula has much of that market anyway. Besides, it's FOSS. Novel can't kill it if it wants to, so long as there are programmers willing to work on it.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

Once again, go take a look at Zimbra. There was a article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago that was front page even that covered the traction Zimbra is getting. It even mentioned that Microsoft and specifically Bill G knew about Zimbra, and were starting to have customers bring it up. That's the kind of product the open source world needs in this space.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

Hula wasn't able to do anything without a huge amount of duct-tape and bailing wire. Even if you did manage by some mircle to get it working, replacing all of the sendmail, httpd and ldap servers, you could not integrate with ActiveDirectory, could not add functionality to the stack, had a web interface that was just plain ugly (dragonfly is much better) and could not easily integrate with most of the anti spam systems out there.

More to the point, they had a core crew that looked at JWZ, declared him God, read his statements, proclaimed them good, and then immediately replayed every single mistake that Mozilla ever made.

Hula needed to be simple, clean and functional. Even know a year later, it is none of those things.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

>Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with that decision?

NO... never... They wouldn't do a thing like that...

Anyway next weeks update to SLES10 will include the following features
a) OpenOffice has been updated to load/save Word documents by default and Macros will run by default.
b) Firefox has been updated to use MSN as it's homepage and default search engine
c) Evolution has been patched to try and execute all email attachments when you view an email.
d) All the above programs now need to be run as root

Re:Coincidence? I think not

Short answer:
No, believe it or not, Microsoft wasn't in on this.

Longer answer:
I work at Novell, and for about a year, I was on Hula. I loved it. I still run it on my home server, and it still bothers me that I didn't get to finish and polish the bits I was hacking on. An insufficient degree of planning and management led to the magic "1.0" getting pushed farther out and being less clearly defined. Inside Novell culture (and elsewhere, I would think), that's a bad sign. Other projects were in the spotlight, some Ximian modus operandi kept a lot of Hula's exciting stuff secret, and a few months back, the already-thin team was cut back dramatically. At the same time, its release deadline was moved up, and Hula was still without what I'd call a manager. The writing was on the wall well before the Microsoft deal came around.

I made the mistake of getting pretty emotionally attached to Hula, so this has all been pretty rough for me to watch. I worked weekends and wee hours on that code, and I'd do it again. I can't blame anyone for using this news as fuel for the fire and/or shouting "Novell just doesn't get it", and I can't blame anyone for being highly suspicious given the recent Microsoft deal (I'm still not sure how I feel about that, by the way). But I can say, and you can take with as much salt you want: No, this was the result, a long time coming, of numerous mistakes, and of other decisions that truly didn't seem like mistakes at the time. As much as I love to blame Microsoft for stuff, the facts say otherwise in this case.

Its death as a Novell-sponsored project is unfortunate, but Hula's not dead - it's grown a small community and a bunch of us still have commit access. Read the mailing list message, take a breather, and if you still feel like being pissed off at Novell or Microsoft, fine. I tried. But at least check out Hula. It still has a ton of promise and is surprisingly useful today.

What?

An open source project dying a quiet, pathetic death in lieu of things that might actually generate revenue?

NOW I've seen everything.

Zimbra?

Didn't Zimbra [zimbra.com] beat them to the punch anyway?

Re:Zimbra?

All of the options, including Zimbra and OpenXchange, have serious problems. Hula looked really nifty and nice, if a bit monolithic. However, it always had a whiff of the vaporware about it and I think the case on that is now closed.

Re:Zimbra? - also Scalix, PostPath

• Scalix [scalix.com]
• PostPath [postpath.com]

Customers left stranded!

So where will be buy our hula hoops from now? :-(

Ping...

You should check your ping times.

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement [techp.org].

I don't think there's anything illegal about Novell dropping its support for the Hula project, but it's another sign that they've welshed out on their former friends for money. About the best we could do in response would be to continue the project and get it deployed in the enterprise.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

I don't think there's anything illegal about Novell dropping its support for the Hula project

You don't think?!?! Last time I checked there was no law forcing them to pay for Hula development. If you don't like Novell, just don't use their products. No need to pull a Redhat and imply that they're criminals.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

If you don't like Novell, just don't use their products.

Telling me not to use Novell's products if I don't like them ignores the fact that I'm one of the guys who wrote "their" products. I doubt you can install that system without using my software. And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.

No need to ... imply that they're criminals.

Except that they've just chosen to ally with an authentic convicted anti-monopoly law violator, found so by more than one jurisdiction. And their collusion with that law violator is engineered to reinforce the monopoly.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

people are free to do things you don't like with it

Yes, when I wrote the Open Source Definition, I made sure that it would be OK for you to use Open Source even if the author didn't like your politics. This was because of a license I'd seen from UC Berkeley on the Spice circuit simulation program, which prohibited the police of South Africa from using it. And still did, 10 years after apartheid was over and said police were probably Black.

But this case is different, becuase Novell and Microsoft have created a legal fiction of covenants rather than licenses in order to do what my license prohibits.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Sorry, the agreement that comes with your software requires them to pay Hula developers how, exactly?

The agreement doesn't require them to do that. That's just walking out on your frends for money. And I suppose you're going to tell me there's nothing bad about that, because it's not breaking the law.

The agreement does, however, require that they not create a tiered environment of patent rights on my software. Which is what they are trying to do.

Is "welsh" an ethnic slur? On people from Wales? Sorry. I didn't know.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

Have you yourself never started a project and decided not to finish it?

Novell would be *ecstatic* if some of the great developers in the Hula community continued to carry Hula forward.

Good lord, Bruce, your character smearing of Novell is reaching new lows. To imply that this decision has anything to do with Novell's commitment to the free software community is just offensive.

Interoperability, anyone?

Remember when the deal between Microsoft and Novell was to "encourage interoperability"?

Here's that "interoperability" at work, folks...

Calendar Sharing

For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it. I do recall being excited by Hula when I heard about it before because it seemed like "finally" something would happen. So I'm dissapointed by this news.

My present solution is for my secretary to manage my calendar with korganizer -- I then just overwrite my calendar on my mac laptop (ical works fine with the korganizer files). But it would be nice to not have to call her up and say "please put ____ on my calendar." I'd rather just do it and have the calendars sync up. The ics files are understandable text files and I've thought of trying to make a sync system by comparring the files on my computer and my secretary's, but I just dabble at computer stuff -- I'm not a real programmer and I can't risk my calendar to my low quality skills. So still I wait.

Because they already have one?

While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange.

I know it'll never happen, but I've said many times before, the best thing Novell could do for their Linux interests is open source Groupwise.

2007: In other news

Novell has introduced Tux-change, a MS-sanctioned port of Exchange for Windows
The company also states that it will soon release it own version of CIFS after the SAMBA organisation was sued into bankruptcy.

Linux-based Exchange server?

From the Hula Project web site: [hula-project.org]

Hula is a [Linux-based] mail and calendar server with a friendly web-interface designed for a great user experience.

So if Novell has taken all their FT developers off Hula, are we to assume that Microsoft is now going to offer a Linux-native version of the Exchange server? I mean, come on. If Microsof