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Novell Software Linux

Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code 223

Posted by Zonk from the that's-a-lot-of-if-statements dept.
H0ek writes "Seems Novell has announced at LinuxWorld Expo that they will be releasing 200,000+ lines of code to the community in the form of a project named Hula(TM). The project is derived from the Novell NetMail product and provides web-based email and calendaring. Seems our boy Nat Friedman has some info on this, too. If you were fortunate enough to get a MyRealBox email account, you will probably know what NetMail is like."
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Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code More

Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code

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  • I am not an enterprise admin... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:59PM (#11683165) Journal
    But if I were setting up an IT infrastructure at a 200+ computer office, I'd want to keep e-mail and calendars separate. I know it's probably just me, but I like having a separate calendar program.
    • What web based calendar does everyone use? We have been using WebCalendar [utexas.edu](spiffy name eh?) and it works ok, but the interface is kinda hokie looking (plus it is waaaaay too busy). Anyone else have any preferences?
    • So hack the email portion of it out...

    • Re:I am not an enterprise admin... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Telastyn ( 206146 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:08PM (#11683265)
      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...]
    • I really don't think you need to worry too much about having them on seperate servers, from http://hula-project.org/index.php/FAQ#How_well_doe s_it_scale.3F:

      Scalability was the primary design parameter for the original codebase. Anecdotally, people have run 200,000 registered users on a single $4,000 PC, with a 25% concurrency rate (that's over 50,000 concurrently-connected users).

    • And it shows... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@keir[ ]ad.org ['ste' in gap]> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:12PM (#11683323)
      .. 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.

      • Re:And it shows... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:14PM (#11683350) Journal
        I'm not saying that the functionality cannot be integrated. I'm saying that the services do not need to be tightly coupled and made into one to acheive that integration.
        • It is normally difficult to achieve the level of integration required without this tight coupling. It is not like there is this standard calendar API one could use.

          There is iCal, but all that is good for is the storing / retrieving calendars. That is a starting point for integration, but it is one step on a mile long journey.

          This is why you have all kinds of Open Source PIM suites out there ( Kontact, Evolution, OpenGroupware, etc ), but you can't easily do something like use Thunderbird for your email an
          • *sigh* It's obvious that I haven't had much dealings with most non-techie exchange-using types, but first of all it would seem to me that it would be easy enough to put the e-mail integration in a calendar application--just use the generic 'mail' command.

            But I'll concede that exchange has created and firmed this association to the point where the level of integration required is more than even the level of integration that a word processor and a spreadsheet need.

            • The integration point is not for being bale to email from within the calendar app, it is for being able to import meeting events end invitaitons that people email you *into* your calendar. It is also for other people to be able to quickly and easily see your online state in the calendaring application while they are scheduling a meeting to which they want to invite you.

              There are numerous Open Source packages that do this quite well - there is no need for exchange here. But there *is* a need for the calenda
            • Lotus Notes was the first, and still popular mail,calendar,pim app.
      • I guess more than a few places are using Sun's calendaring application without attaching it right to email. Notifications go to the email when there is something to do on the calendar server, and it's all java web-based so you can use it from wherever. I don't see any reason they have to be linked, if you can get people to read their email.

      • Re:And it shows... (Score:2, Informative)

        by aaronl ( 43811 )
        Amazingly enough, it is in fact quite possible to input this data yourself. Plus, you get to save your company potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because it is possible to have a calendar without having it tightly integrated with email.

        Also quite interesting, is that I do run a network of a large number of machines, and nobody has ever seen the need to have this functionality. Everything that Outlook does can be done with seperate apps, and can often be done better. If the people you wo

    • Re:I am not an enterprise admin... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nat Friedman ( 31798 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:18PM (#11683391) Homepage

      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.
    • From the client perspective you can use as many or few programs as you want. Five IMAP clients on one computer? No problem. Sunbird (standalone cal) support is in the roadmap.

      On the server side folks are looking for an exchange replacement that scales way up.

      They are not looking for an openserver cobled togther set of scripts / programs / configuration directives.

      I don't think the limited combo is going to be a huge problem in the marketplace.

      And you'll be surprised at how enterpise admin folks like ser

  • Released as LGPL - Are you watching, Sun...? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by donnz ( 135658 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:03PM (#11683214) Homepage Journal
    "Licensed as open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL)".

    See, that's how it's done. Simple really and no need for weeks of backtracking, bullshit and misleading statements.
    • They know [openoffice.org]. They just seem to have other plans...
      • They just seem to have other plans...

        That's what I'm afraid of.

        • Their plans are to _prevent_ patent lawsuits, not cause them. Read this blog [sun.com] entry. In short, the FUD mongers are wrong.
          • You mean because someone (SunMink? who s/he?) writes a blog saying they promise to be nice the "FUD mongers are wrong". Comeon.

            If Sun wants to extend it's sandpit alittle that's fine. Sun is not doing what they claimed they were doing. The are not making the largest number of patents available to the open source community evah!, they are not "releasing Solaris" to the community at large. End of story.

            Today the news from Sun is all "oh, if you don't like our licence don't use it". Fine, but on flip side of
            • You mean because someone (SunMink? who s/he?) writes a blog saying they promise to be nice the "FUD mongers are wrong". Comeon.

              SunMink is Simon Phipps, an executive at Sun who writes on the same level as Groklaw. Not knee-jerk stuff, not OSRM insurance sales pitches.

              Sun is populating OpenSolaris with its own patent portfolio via the CDDL to protect it from litigation. OpenSolaris will have its own IP asset base to put it on par with other patent holders, so, if someone decides to sue, OpenSolaris is ve

  • And the reason? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Infinityis ( 807294 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:03PM (#11683218) Homepage
    So what's the rationale behind this? Is it basically the same as catching a fish and throwning it back becasue it was too little? Not enough profits? Are they hoping that open source developers will make as user friendly as Gmail?

    Also, how exactly do they transfer it over to open source? Will company employees still head up the project, or do they just pick some leader in the OSS community and declare a project leader?

    • Re:And the reason? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dameron ( 307970 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:07PM (#11683263)
      This is a total stab in the dark but I'm guessing they're really going to be pushing their OpenExchange solution instead.

      -dameron

    • Re:And the reason? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by denissmith ( 31123 )
      Rumors, and they are really only rumors, are that the new Novell strategy is to migrate the old Netware services, which are a fairly complete and easily managed set of directory, print and Groupware services, to Linux. This is to stave off the inroads that Microsoft has been making in large companies who need these services. Some of these new services will be open source, like this announcement - some may remain proprietary. Basically Novell needs to move its existing clients onto Linux, while keeping
    • They thought a program like this would go great with poor documentation and inadequate maintenance. After reading this slashdot article [slashdot.org] they figured OSS was the way to go.

    • Re:And the reason? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nat Friedman ( 31798 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:34PM (#11684236) Homepage

      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.
      • And openxchange doesn't fit the bill because....? There is already a previous relationship that is pretty strong (SUSE, as you well know), a good product, that has seen some serious market usage, and a very solid, functionally complete featureset i.e. everything that is there is there for a good reason, minimal bloat. It is also Open Source.

        Seems to me that openxchange does all the stuff you list, and more. Except that openexchange also potentially competes with edirectory, Ifolder, Iprint, and some of t

    • Re:And the reason? (Score:5, Informative)

      by swerk ( 675797 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:35PM (#11684240) Journal
      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.

      • Re:And the reason? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:05PM (#11684530) Homepage
        Of course, we all can't know exactly what the top-execs are really thinking, what's PR and what's for real, but I for one am glad to hear Novell has at least an rookie programmer with that sort of optimism about FOSS. I just hope your attitude is indicative of the general tone over there.

        All public indications are that Novell's participation in open-source communities is in earnest, and they've been releasing some pretty good stuff to GPL (YaST, Ximian Exchange connector, now this). I'm really hoping y'all over at Novell succeed in showing that it's possible to play nice, contribute to FOSS, and still get past that old "2) ????" step and see some profit. It could provide a good contrast to other companies who seem to feel like they need to screw over everyone else and stifle their competition in order to succeed.

        Anyway, have fun storming the castle!

    • If anyone can make a go of the Unix corporate desktop it is Novell. They understand the corporate environment like no other. Releasing this code strengthens their position.
    • >So what's the rationale behind this?

      They're pissing in the groupware well. A competitor makes a lot of money from their groupware product, they're trying to "cut off their oxygen supply" by supplying a free alternative.

      Just like MS destroyed Netscape by giving away IE.

      Just like Sun is trying to devalue MS Office via Open Office.

  • Why the silly names ? :( (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rfinnvik ( 16122 ) * on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:04PM (#11683230)
    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:(

    • Re:Why the silly names ? :( (Score:5, Funny)

      by flacco ( 324089 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:10PM (#11683982)
      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.

    • Capitalize on 'em! (was Why on silly names? ) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ediron2 ( 246908 ) * on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:56PM (#11684449) Journal
      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!
    • Their close proximity to Akamai must be wearing off on them.

    • hoop! (Score:2)

      by fons ( 190526 )
      I'm guessing they have a product in the pipeline that will be called "HULA-HOOP".

      Seriously. They are not selling HULA, they are selling NetMail. They don't want mangager-type-people to LIKE the free HULA. They want managers to BUY Netmail.

      The HULA-name is only targetted at us communists.
    • Trust me, "Hula" is good, compared to the other names that were considered. (I'm straining my brain to remember, "bongo" was one, I think.) I thought it was a bit silly too, but it's grown on me very quickly. As was pointed out during a presentation where we (here at Novell) were introduced to the concept, it's ridiculously hard to snag a good name that isn't already trademarked. We could do NOCS for Novell Open Collaboration Server/Suite/System, but what if Red Hat snuck up on us and announced ROCS? ;^)

  • nuts for webmail (Score:2, Insightful)

    by eh2o ( 471262 )
    hopefully this app will work better than a certain other webmail named after a rodent with a big bushy tail.

  • Integration (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Albanach ( 527650 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:05PM (#11683235) Homepage
    For a long time I've thought that a calendar server that integrates with Outlook is the missing killer app for open source. Then we hear Evolution will be ported to windows, and an Outlook replacement is suddenly available. With OpenOffice we'll have a complete open source office and groupware suite.

    Of course life is never that simple, and there's a new target for integration - cell phones. PDA sales are declining fast as the cell phone becomes the computer for outside the office. Most rhe big names, Sony, Nokia, Motarola have been offering a calendar for some time and recent ones will happily sync with Outlook. If we can have an open source calendar server that has a good web interface as well as a desktop application like Outlook and a hook into the big name mobile phones, then we'll have all the angles covered.

    • Outlook integration - OpenConnector.Org (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:36PM (#11683604) Journal
      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 ).

    • SyncML is supposed to be the glue between smart phone and the world

      but good luck with that, my Nokia helpfully converts the XML to somem crazy binary format. I've tried reading the copious 9and I mean copious) docs from the SyncML group and W3. I've captured the binary and chucked it into a HEX viewer but I'm convinced that they've pulled an MS and implemented a format that's the same but different such that I can't decode it (or perhaps it's me)

      I've found SyncML programs that do the ASCII/utf-8 version o

  • And I lost several important emails even the guy from Novel tried hard to recover data as his time permitted.

    Hope this step could change it.

    • I used Myrealbox for YEARS and it was ALWAYS beta/unstable as thats why myrealbox is free and clearly stated at www.myrealbox.com. Never seen ONE unplanned downtime.

      Call Novell ANYTHING but never unstable.

      Lazy to find but there was a machine running novell for 4 or more years straight in an university which was -literally- lost.

      BTW, people calling Novell dead, ahem ask Wal Mart what they use. Or what huge airport/ticketing networks use...

      A system not running on your Dell or at your geek friends baseme

  • a reliable alternative to microsoft outlook (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geekschmoe ( 244913 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:08PM (#11683279)
    I really hope this turns into a reliable alternative to Outlook. Every manager will tell you that they need/rely on Outlook calendering functions.

    And every time the server goes down almost every nerd at the place I work (99% UNIX shop) says something about how we need a unix mail server. But that already exists. We need an open source calender server.

    Does something like this exist already or is it in the works? Last time I looked I couldn't find anything comparable.
  • Are they the same thing?

    That is, in iCal which uses WebDAV to store .ics files, I can subscribe to various calendars via webcal:// URLs.

    Is CalDAV the 'official' way of doing this?
  • I'd like to remind everyone that the Citadel project [citadel.org] has a complete, robust, flexible open source groupware server that, unlike Hula, is not abandonware. And, it works today, has developers actively working on it, contains a high-performance standalone messaging engine, does IMAP, calendaring (with support for upcoming versions of Kontact and Evolution built-in thanks to GroupDAV), a nice web-based front end, and all the other stuff you expect. Go check it out.

    By the way, CalDAV is starting to become wid
    • Hula isn't abandonware. It is anything *but*. You have no idea what you are talking about.
      • It might not be abandonware, but I wouldn't bet my job or life on it.

        More importantly, for the things it claims to do now, Netmail/Hula will have to work very hard to be better than alternatives already out there:

        1. Sendmail, Qmail, Exim do SMTP, variously, *really well*

        2. Cyrus does IMAP *really well*

        3. They do this in a manner that scales horizontally across a cluster--I find Hula's scalability claims an invitation to scrutiny, but I wouldn't put 200,000 email accounts on one box, even if I could

        4. W
    • just don't show your boss the citadel logo on the page

    • Re:Abandonware. Try Citadel instead. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by natrius ( 642724 ) * <niran@@@niran...org> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:50PM (#11683787) Homepage
      It's ok to suggest alternatives and all, but if you're going to criticize a project, at least learn something about it. Novell is basing future versions of NetMail on Hula. It's not so much abandoning as it is getting people to help them work on a project for free. Read the FAQ. [hula-project.org]
    • Funny that a standard that is a draft status is "too cumbersome". If you subscribe to the CalDAV development lists you'll see that they are trying very hard to keep the standard quite simple.

    • Re:Abandonware. Try Citadel instead. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nat Friedman ( 31798 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:39PM (#11684283) Homepage

      Hula is not abandonware. It is a project we have only started to invest in.

      Come by #hula on freenode, count the 20-25 Novell employees there, and then determine for yourself what kind of project it is.
    • So, Citadel developer or something calls an application framework, server whatever having latest standards "abandonware" and advertises own product?

      I wouldn't give a shit to that application after reading this. This must be the best way to degrade the product to lowest lame standards.

      http://www.novell.com/products/netmail/ --> "abandonware"

      BTW, we prefer Novell since we can get real support in case some bad thing happen. Imagining to get support from a guy like you... We made a good decision.

  • From the same company that brings you... (Score:3, Informative)

    by noblesse oblige ( 840634 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:16PM (#11683371)
    ... Open Xchange [open-xchange.org]...

    It would be interesting to catch the differences between the two, Open Xchange has a few more collaboration engines in it, namely a project manager and bulletin board.

    In full disclosure we plan on releasing OX in the office sometime soon after their .8 release. Especially now that it looks like they integrate with any IMAP server (freeing us from having to switch to Cyrus).

  • .... You're not gonna be able to get any of these in a MS shop.

    Unfortunate but true.
    • The mail and contacts features already work with Outlook. I'm assuming that they're still working on the Calendaring part.

      http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/FAQ

      Scroll down to the "Clients" area. They have a decent number of clients that work to some degree. Being a new project, I wouldn't expect it to have perfect connectivity to a wide range of clients just yet.
  • That might sound impressive to a non-technical person. And sure, it is _a_lot_ of code! Only, a lot of code is not an asset, it's a liability.

    A web mail system at 200 KLOC sounds like a nightmare to maintain, both as a developer and as an administrator. I bet this was a corporate project that went horribly wrong somewhere and this is an attempt to cut some losses.
    • What?

      LOC does not determine how easy a project is to maintain. Design does. If the project is well designed then no matter how big it is it will be easier to maintain. I've worked on a bit of software that probably only had about 5000 LOC and it was a nightmare!

      200K LOC isn't even a particularly big project. The linux kernel has over 30 million.
      • Sorry to reply to my own post but I made a mistake on the SLOC in the kernel 30 million was in an entire distro.

        The kernel has about 4.2 million.
      • Of course I don't know how complex this web mail system is, but 200,000 lines _suggests_ a poor design with a lot of redundancy. I mainly object to the use of "200KLOC" in the heading to imply that this is an important project. Sheer code size doesn't mean anything -- design does, as you pointed out.
        • Of course I don't know how complex this web mail system is, but 200,000 lines _suggests_ a poor design with a lot of redundancy.

          The two clauses of that sentence don't go together: "I don't know the thing I need to know in order to judge how many lines it should be, so I will assume it is bad."

          Actually, if you look at the product, it is fairly complex and comprehensive and 200KLOC looks very reasonable. It includes an imap system, pop system, interface systems, calendar systems, list managers and a whole
  • there are scads of web-based mail/calendar/project applications. if you want acceptance from the average windows-monkey in business, it will take native clients, and shell integration - right-click context-menu stuff, a "my projects" folder in "my computer", drag/drop everywhere...

    who knows - once evolution is ported to windows, maybe we'll see progress on this front. a cross-platform native groupware client would be a huge win for desktop viability in businesses.

  • Dear Novell, CEASE AND DESIST IMMEDIATLY... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrIcee ( 550834 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:44PM (#11684876) Homepage
    ... or the Hawaiian Islands will be forced to shut you down for dilution of the word "Hula". For example, uses such as "Hula Calendar" dilutes the calendar of events for hula competitions, such as our Merry Monarch International Hula Competition which takes place in May of each year.

    Mahalo nui loa

  • It doesn't work yet. (Score:3, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @09:07PM (#11685029) Homepage Journal
    WebAdmin isn't working right now, and won't be working until (they hope) noon tomorrow. I got all excited, emerged subversion, downloaded the source from the svn server, built and installed it... And discovered that there is no WebAdmin. Uhhhh... okay? You can log in as the admin user, but you can't actually do anything with other people yet.

    Hopefully they'll iron this out, and I'll get a chance to update tomorrow and use the thing. I'm absolutely ready to blow away my qmail+vpopmail setup in favor of this sucker. I might have to install a postfix proxy to handle virus scanning, though.

  • shared addressbook and calendar? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rsax ( 603351 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @09:28PM (#11685150)
    Okay so I saw the screenshots and from the description it is mentioned several times that this is mail + calendaring. Two questions for anyone involved with this project or whoever has used Netmail.

    1. Does this allow a team to share their schedules, calendars? Can you modify each others?

    2. Does this ship with an addressbook that can be shared with other people on the server? Can you add entries in others?

  • Who used it? (Score:3)

    by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:21PM (#11685885) Homepage Journal
    Is it worth making a FreeBSD port for this software?
  • What does this release have to do with Novell's GroupWise, and the Open-Xchange GPL "version"? Does Novell really offer 3 different email servers, each including other groupware features like shared calendars, contacts etc? Are there more in the wings?

  • JWZ (Score:2, Interesting)

    by frithsplot ( 859841 )
    has some interesting thoughts [livejournal.com] on this.
  • And in a related story...

    SCO sues Novell over the use of the number 200,000 which was used in the original unix implementation in a header file.

    IBM is being subpoenaed to discuss licensing issues, and Novel is being ordered to release all 200,000 lines of public code to SCO (whose lawyers apparently didn't know that the code is publicly accessible).

    A Microsoft owned company has already purchased 500 licenses of "litigation protection insurance" from Microsoft to avoid litigation in the future if SCO sho
  • The DNA Lounge [dnalounge.com] owner comments [livejournal.com] about the "groupware Hula" (advises/admonishes Nat Friedman on?) and by the ways clarifies about the Netscape-Collabra innards.

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