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And if I were setting up [another] IT infrastructure at a 200+ computer office, I'd realise that every non-technical user expects calendaring to be part of their messaging system, since y'know their messaging system is used solely to schedule things...

Though personally, I'd love that messaging system to be IM rather than email, but that is yet to exist nicely [though Exchange supports something like it, but I've not tried it, since... it's Exchange...]

.. because if you were, and you tried to roll out an IT infrastructure that did *not* have integrated email and calendaring, you would likely be fired.

Seriously, if you have worked at any even moderately-sized organization, you would know that this is essential. There are people I work with, who I know would be totally unable to function without this kind of integration. And I don't blame them either - if I had to be in that many meetings / week, I would need it as well.

You can run the Hula calendar separately from the mailer/MTA. We definitely want to follow the one-problem one-tool rule for people who want that.

This is a total stab in the dark but I'm guessing they're really going to be pushing their OpenExchange solution instead.

-dameron

Open source hasn't yet succeeded in building a collaboration server that people can actually use in a variety of settings. We want to fill this gap with Hula.

We believe that people mainly just want the basics: mail, calendaring, addressbook, maybe shared documents.

The dominant solutions today -- Exchange and Notes -- are built on a 20-year old design that predates the web. They were intended to be platforms on which you could build tools like expense processing, vacation requests, and other things. This was called "workflow."

Today, those functions are all done on internal web sites. It's just better. Who wants to build on the Exchnage "platform" if they don't have to?

But still companies are stuck with these hopelessly big, complex servers, just to do basic email and calendaring. They are expensive, they are heavyweight. They overdeliver.

So what we want to build with Hula is, in a way, the "Firefox" of collaboration servers. Do the basics, and do them extremely well. Provide an extension system so other people can add things if they want.

Dave Camp is the maintainer of Hula; he has a lot of experience in open source and we think he'll guide the project well. Many of the Novell engineers behind the original code (notably David Smith and Rodney Price) are working on the Hula project and will continue to work on it.

We're serious about making Hula work. Stop by #hula on freenode if you want to meet us.

I'm a (newish, but still) software engineer at Novell, and I'd like to answer your questions quickly from my little point of view.

The rationale behind this is that we'd like to put out something that's simple at first but can seed an ecosystem of its own, and, with some luck, one day become "the Apache of collaboration". Netmail was a good fit because there were very few issues IP-wise in releasing the code, and because it's a young and extensible base that has the potential to evolve into a killer enterprise-level system. If we were to open up GroupWise, for example, (if that were even possible, which it isn't) we'd be saying to the world "hey, come on and help out with our finished, mature product", which isn't nearly as stimulating as "hey, come on and help shape the future of collaboration!" The latter may be a smidge optimistic, but that's honestly what we're shooting for, if I understand Nat correctly.

As for transferring development of Netmail to the open Hula project, here's what I know and (I hope!) am allowed to say: Netmail was a very small team. The Hula team is bigger. So no, we're not just tossing it out and watching to see who in the OSS community should be the project leader. It's still our project, though everybody is free to fork if they decide we're headed in the wrong direction. That does two things: it forces us to stay honest and on the up-and-up with the OSS community, and (as of right now, no turning back) it gives to the world a useful piece of free software that can and will get more and more useful over time.

There was a joke made in the hallways here (and possibly elsewhere in these comments) in reference to South Park. Step 1: Release Hula. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!

Step 2 is to play the game right, to give OSS folks what they want and what they need to help us build (or build themselves, if they so desire) a really sweet communications system. Something that there would be demand for at the enterprise level. Right now, Hula is mail and calendar. A year from now, I would be very surprised if it did not include IM, some form of VOIP, and some things I can't even imagine right now. Apache, QT, MySQL, and so on have shown that there is money to be made from a free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer tool if: 1) It's good, and 2) An ecosystem develops around it. That money, of course, is what Novell is looking for in the end, and I've got to say I'm pretty excited to see the way we're going after it. Microsoft built a proprietary community around Exchange, and it has dominated collaboration for years. I'm rooting for Hula's free, open community that was officially born today.

So there's two cents from a rookie Novell programmer.

Why do people insist on calling these projects such silly names ? :P I've been trying to get my company to go with NetMail, but... Hula ? My boss will just laugh at me:(

just make up an important-sounding acronym:

High-end Ultimate Life Assistant.

ok, that sucks. make up your own.

Why do people insist on calling these projects such silly names ? :P I've been trying to get my company to go with NetMail, but... Hula ? My boss will just laugh at me:(

Ah, you mean silly names like:

Amiga or apple, bob or beowulf, cairo, dongles, EBCDIC or EULA's, FOSS, GoDaddy (I was the only one at my superbowl party to know what they sold/did before or after their ad), honeypots, intuit, java, the Kompany, lisp or LAMP, macintosh or mozilla, newegg or numega, outlook, python or perl or php-nuke, quark, raid, scsi (whether you pronounce it scuzzy or sexy), twiki or TeX, unix, vax, wifi or windows, x, yahoo, zip or zope?

(forgive me, I know there are plenty of wierder names... my point is that any new brand name or jargon carries a risk of misinterpretation)

Based on past experience, do like I do and say you think 'HULA' is an acronym. Better yet, slather on some business jargon or statistics. Your bosses will nod and and pretend to have read about it being the next new thing so they could claim credit for ordering you to use it. That's how I got to implement a LAMP server and a few other FOSS apps long before they'd trust Linux. Or how I got the ok for Numega. 'Raid'ing the important database drives scared one company's leadership until we explained it. One old boss was screamin' mad to find out that 'scuzzy' drives cost *more*. And one of my homebrewing friends got all excited when I mentioned I was helping put together a honeynet. Not that I blame him... free fermentables sound a lot more interesting than getting hacked on purpose.

Speaking of which, it's beer-fiftynine. Gotta run!

For a long time I've thought that a calendar server that integrates with Outlook is the missing killer app for open source.

I thought so too, and started OpenConnector.Org [openconnector.org] a while ago to fix this.

An Outlook connector would allow the thousands of Microsoft Outlook users to connect to a CalDAV calendar server or something like Hula

Although we've come a long way with the OpenConnector project ( we now have a MAPI Message Store that loads, and lots of code to base the Transport Provider off of...) a full Outlook connector is still a lot more work. Most completed commercial connectors, I've heard are developed by a team of fulltime developers, so help is *always* needed. Even simple things like the network protocol library, which requires no knowledge of Outlook or MAPI.

At any rate, I think it is a good time for internet calendaring, especially with CalDAV coming out with so much support ( OSA Foundation, Oracle, Mozilla, and many others... ), and on track ( 5 drafts in a few months ).