Novell Dumps the Hula Project 440
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."
Zimbra? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Zimbra? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Exchange Gift (Score:1, Informative)
Cheerio,
D.
Because they already have one? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Coincidence? I think not (Score:3, Informative)
Hula was a piece of software that deserved to die. It did the things that Exchange does but didn't interoperate with Exchange. And since not many people in the Linux/Unix world are interested in running a mail server like Exchange/Hula that is a jack of all trades, master of none, people didn't really use Hula. So Novell was pouring all the time and money into a project that they thought everyone wanted, but no one really did.
Honestly, have you heard of anyone actually using Hula? I certainly haven't. I'm sure the Novell sales reps made a few sales based on Hula, but really anyone with a clue was running Sendmail, Postfix, or whatever plain Jane email server your prefer, and the few people who really did want an Exchange like solution just ran something like Zimbra that does the same thing but runs Postfix underneath.
If dumping Hula means that Novell will spend money on things that are actually useful to the open source community then this is great news. Because I'm sure no one is really sorry to see Hula go.
What timing. (Score:4, Informative)
Thus far I've tried Hula, RSCDS, Cosmo, and Apple's CalendarServer and none of them seem to be the perfect solution. I'd love to see a package that acts as both a CalDAV server, but also gives you the ability to view and edit the calendars via a nice looking web-interface as well. I'm thankful for the projects that are currently being worked on however, and I guess I should stop complaining and start coding...
Re:Coincidence? I think not (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, come on (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scalix ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Coincidence? I think not (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No need for Hula. Try Citadel instead. (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, do try Citadel -- it is a very well-integrated collaboration server with an ajax-style web user interface, built-in data stores, lightweight implementations of all relevant protocols (POP, IMAP, SMTP, etc.)
Re:salt/wound? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scalix ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, come on (Score:5, Informative)
No, completely different. Hula comes from Novell NetMail. SLOX came from SuSE.
Re:Zimbra? - also Scalix, PostPath (Score:4, Informative)
Re:salt/wound? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Coincidence? I think not (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
I implemented Netmail for a reasonably large non profit organisation here in Australia with terrific results. Since Netmail integrated so tightly with eDirectory (which we used to keep the membership information) it was a breeze giving everyone an email address with wemail, forwarding, spam protection, calendaring, etc. One of the best features was its recognition of eDirectory groups (even dynamic ones) which we used as the basis for email lists with great effect (up to the minute accurate based on user defined attributes).
When Novell first announced Hula I was concerned what this might mean for the existing Netmail installations (here are many who are *much* larger than us). Admittedly, I have not kept a close eye on the developments as I have moved on to other projects, but is seems my initial fears were confirmed. I hope the small development community around Hula continues and releases great stuff.
BTW - IMHO, Hula was never really meant to be an Exchange killer. As a kid it was trained to do different things and was never really suited to taking on the big boy. Novell has Groupwise against Exchange, but that is a whole other subject...
Re:Active directory is what we need (Score:2, Informative)
>>compatible with Windows, with a schema compatible with Windows 2003 Server
>>or such, and a management console that doesn't involve writing up text
>>files and then using some command line tool to parse them.
Agree; this is what Samba 4 will be. It is nothing resembling easy.
> Have you heard of Apple Computer? They make something along these lines.
No they don't. A Mac can participate in an AD domain, it can't master one. Anything (BSD, Mac, Linux, etc...) reasonably recent can participate in an AD domain. But even then only partially, they don't respect user policies, etc... or all the other niceities .
Re:Oh, come on (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Calendar Sharing (Score:2, Informative)
Postfix and Cyrus imapd on the server. This is the part that gives you a single place to hold all your email, calendar and contacts and share access with others.
On the client side, you use KMail to access the imap server. Hint: Use disconnected IMAP instead of online IMAP - it's just better. In KMail setup, you go to misc->groupware, activate the IMAP resource functionality, and set your IMAP inbox as the place you hold the things. This gives you a set of subfolders that will hold the contacts, calendar items, notes, and todos. Sync your mail account. Right click on the calendar folder, choose properties, access control, and add your secretary.
Go to the KDE control center and choose KDE components->KDE resources. For contacts, calendar and notes you now add the imap resource and remove the other resources.
Now start up Kontact or the individual apps, and reimport your saved calendar and contacts.
When your secretary accesses the imap server, he/she will get access to your calendar/contacts folder (if you gave that access). He needs to set the properties on the folders and choose the contents to be calendar/contacts/whatever and to also do the resources and IMAP groupware setup.
It's so complicated to do the initial setup, but it actually works really well. I was part of the team that wrote all of this as part of the Kolab project, and I've used it for almost four years now.
It's even possible to share calendar, mail and contacts with Outlook users, but that's a longer story.
I hope it will help you and others.
Bo Thorsen,
Thorsen Consulting.
www.thorsen-consulting.dk - Qt expert services.
Re:salt/wound? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Karma (Score:3, Informative)
Like a hand from the sky...