Slashdot Mirror
HP Ending OpenMail
Ron Harwood writes "Hewlett-Packard has announced that version 7.0 of OpenMail will be the last major release of the application. OpenMail is a pretty good competitor to MS Exchange and it can be used under Unix. Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code." The ComputerWorld article says that this is the last *major* release - bug fixes and such will still come out. As well, they will provide support for the next five years, but it sounds like OpenMail may have reached the end of it's lifespan.
"Is it just her, or all women CEO's like this, afraid of a little competition?"
Come on. What kind of statement is that. Besides, I'm sure she has a board to report to, so it is probably not her decision alone. It's more likely that HP viewed Openmail as a big waste of time, effort, and of course money - so they dropped it. What's the big deal?
No, it doesn't sound like a good deal when you think about it.
OK, so HP could charge for support.
HOWEVER, there are two problems which can arise there -
(1) As it is all open source, there is nothing to stop others muscling in on this so-called "lucrative" support deal, undercutting HP and generally significantly reducing HP's income from support.
(2) HP would no longer have control over the source per se, nor would they directly know what was happening to it unless the spend time (and hence money) to keep looking at what's going on - makes supporting a product bloody difficult when you have no control over it and don't know what's being done to it - the only way to know is to pay lots of people to watch the development, and if you are going to invest thatsort of time, money and manpower then you may as well just develop it inhouse for less cost anyway.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
There are several reasons why a hardware company like HP might want to open source a software product when it has reached the point where it is no longer generating revenue. The most obvious reason that they might want to do this is discontinuing support for a product upsets your customers. I imagine there are a whole pile of HP customers right now that are vowing to never trust HP again. After all, they have poured time, effort, and money into implementing HP's software product and now HP is announcing plans to leave them high and dry. I imagine that if I was in their shoes I would take a serious look migrating completely away from HP. I almost certainly would at least give the Sun salesman who has been pestering me a call and see what Sun could do for me.
Sure, it's hard to let go of source code that has you have spent so much money on over the years, but don't overlook the fact that HP has almost certainly made money on OpenMail over all of those years. Opening the source code would allow them to cut down costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of the code, while still allowing them to leverage the code to sell hardware and support. They could easily turn it into a selling point for HPUX (now with a free unlimited license for OpenMail).
Of course, if HP could find a buyer for OpenMail that would probably be better. The customers wouldn't be completely stranded (although the would probably still resent HP for ditching them), and it might make them some money. But if not, then they should seriously consider opening the source code. After all, what does it hurt them to do so? They aren't going to be using that code, and they don't have another email suite that competes with it.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace.
Whoa there, Chester. Check your facts before spouting. They didn't "promptly" bail out of anything. Openmail is the most popular UNIX-based corporate mail software on the market, and has been for something like 12 years. They have in the tens of millions of seats worldwide.
The reason that it's not more widely known, despite its widespread use is that it falls into a curious niche among mail solutions. Shops with mostly MS-based servers don't run Openmail, because it would require administrators to learn to use their keyboards (Openmail is CLI-administered). But smallish shops with UNIX-familiar admins can easily drop in a Linux box with a Free (speech/beer) mail solution.
Openmail finds its use somewhere in between: in UNIX environments that need highly-scalable solutions where some degree of collaboration is necessary. Openmail includes support for corporate directories, bulletin boards, Outlook MAPI, and some other features where OSS just doesn't cut it. I know, because I worked for three years trying to stay fully open source before I finally had to break down and install Openmail. LDAP just doesn't have functionality we needed (not LDAP's fault, Outlook just doesn't play nicely with it), and we needed some Public Folders functionality within Outlook, which we couldn't get on a large scale with any open source stuff. And there was no way in hell I was going to install Exchange.
The last thing is that, as reported in the ./ blurb, Openmail's support will continue for five years. Five years is an eternity in this market. If you're a sysadmin right now, think about what your organization's mail solution was five years ago. If you even had your current job five years ago, which is statistically unlikely (as if there's any other kind of unlikeliness), it is even more unlikely that your current mail setup is the same as it was five years ago.
Lots can happen in five years. They could decide to spin it off, they could decide to open-source it, they could change their minds and keep it, the government could discover some insidious MS plot to get rid of Openmail, etc. Their long-time corporate customers are pissed at this announcement, and might be able to sway them into taking one of the above courses of action. In fact, I'm pretty hopeful about it.
Openmail kicks ass, I love it, if you couldn't tell. I can support any mail user in my organization so easily, it's not even thinkable to move to Exchange, or back to sendmail/exim/qmail/whatever. Outlook clients, IMAP, POP, LDAP, it's fantastic. I know what I'll be using for (at least) the next three-four years, even if they aren't working on version 8.
Belloc (I don't work for HP, just a satisfied customer)
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
An R5 client user has the option of reverting to the old Workspace interface if they choose. Other than that, most all of the dialogs, etc work the same as R4.
Well, it's actually a male conspiracy. See, a bunch of male professors got together and created "Womens Studies" programmes at liberal arts colleges, and a bunch of co-eds went and majored in those courses. While the men were studying Finance, Engineering, Law et al. So now, there aren't many women around with the background or education for senior level management, and them good ol' boys are running the show. Heh, heh, heh, they never saw it coming.
(Note for the subtlety impaired: this is a joke).
So, what does OpenMail offer that Sendmail, Qmail, Smail, etc. don't?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This will rock! See http://www.ximian.org/newsitems/hp-partnership.php 3 for more info.
No conspiracy theory here AC. Look at the facts, Microsoft didn't want HP to market openmail on NT.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Then there's an article about Microsoft and you're bound to see a number of posts screaming for DOJ to step in.
I guess Big Brother is ok as long as it's YOUR Big Brother...Do you know why most binaries of OpenView VantagePoint Operations have the prefix opc?
The original name of VPO (formerly ITO) was Operations Performance Center (or something like that). A name a competitor of OpenView was not very happy about, because they also used the word 'Center' in their management products. Finally this firm told HP to change the name or they won't continue support of HP-UX in their management platform. Selling HP-UX servers gains a much bigger revenue than selling software. So that's the story why HP changed the name and smoked Marketing investments in the old product name.
Sorry, but this is simply not true. A lot of ISPs are replacing Sun Solaris with HP-UX. Example: amazon.com
Marketshares of IBM AIX are not worth mentioning.
I'd be curious to hear the take of a certain high profile open source community figure who went to HP a short while back.
Bruce?
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Yeah, the US Openmail product manager at the time, a developer for the product and an internal trainer at the Pinewood UK development centre.
HP had no issue with telling large Openmail install bases like Amaco and Fuji why they dumped the NT release they had been hyping for the last year. This of course this is hearsay, but too many HP employees from different parts of the world have came out and said it. I see no reason to disbelieve it.
It's my OPINION MS played some role in the the final decision to ax Openmail. This s not to say a lot of presure had to be put out. It's not like the product lost money, but it certainly wasn't a profit centre for HP. I could see a little hinting from MS about a Free 50 seat OpenMail distro on a free RedHat box that talks MAPI and supports most of the outlook feature set may cause a little bit of friction.
But that's just my OPINION.
The internal switch from OpenMail to Exchange happened several months ago.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Lotus Notes/Domino R5 is all about open standards (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP, LDAP) and can be a quite good/stable solution. It does need a competent admin-force, as does anything else.
Server runs on OS/390, OS/400, AIX, SunOS, HPUX, Linux and NT. Clients are Wintel/MacOS only, though.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Optimistically Carly is trying to gather more effort around a new strategic direction for HP's software, and Openmail didn't match that strategy.
Pessimistically Openmail was strategically valuable but was under intense competition by other companies who understand better than HP how valuable it is and forced it into unprofitability.
HP as a corporation is definitely moving in the first direction, but historically we've been more in the second (especially wrt. software.) Whether the internal friction of reinventing the corporation places this more in the first camp or more in the second I can't guess, but I sure hope it isn't as the previous poster said; simply a matter of projected profit. The implication would be that HP is incapable of forming and executing on a strategy, which is something I don't believe.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Check out http://www.slipstick.com (too lazy to make it a clickable link) for comments on Net Folders. Briefly they're quirky, unreliable, prone to dying for no apparent reason, etc. Nice idea but has never actually worked in a useful fashion.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
> It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
It is not a problem. In a few hundred of years, when the copyright will expire, you'll get your DVD version.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I am not kidding.
Opening OpenMail is a CAN'T LOSE proposition.
No, it isn't, don't kid yourself.
This is the major problem with ESR's own writings. He claims that open-sourcing an application is a guarantee for its survival. It isn't. It must be both crucial and interesting ("scratch an itch") and most of all, it must be possible to participate.
Apache, Samba, the Linux kernel and every other large open source I looked at have the advantage of being very clear, easy-to-read code, so that it's easy to find a particular part of an application and patch it.
If Open Mail is one huge clunk of spaghetti code, noone will even bother looking at it a second time. I'm sure that many folks don't participate in Mozilla and Open Office because they are so darn huge and complicated...
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Actually, HP also owns a few calculator markets (financial and scientific) with their 12c and 48gx. Frankly, I'll take an HP over anything TI makes any day of the week.
They also have a decent foothold in the PC market with their desktops and notebooks, although it is by no means dominant.
As far as I can tell, the biggest problem with HP is that they seem very conservative about moving in with new products. They seem to be content with not being #1.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Face it: Outlook/Exchange's popularity isn't about functionality, technology, or features. It's popular because it's, well, popular.
If you are saying that given the bits and pieces we already have, it might not be difficult to create an alternative, you're probably right. But someone has got to do it, and so far, nobody has bothered.
While patches and support for a product are certainly better than nothing, I am sure that you will agree that OpenMail clients probably were hoping for a great deal more than this.
And now HP has loyal customers looking for alternatives. In many cases this probably means alternatives for the operating system running their OpenMail servers as well.
Instead of turning these loyal customers out in the street HP could make several of them even more loyal customers by releasing the source code. What do they have to lose?
And you point is? There are many facets of government and one of them is for the people to use their voices to keep the government in check and to call on the government to step in when an entinty has gotten out of hand. I see nothing wrong with this so called dichotomy you see.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Let's imagine that I just spent the money and rolled OpenMail over my entire enterprise. Now, HP tells me that they have discontinued development of the product, and they are only going to support it for five more years. Basically they have just guaranteed that the time and effort that I spent migrating to OpenMail was wasted, and I now have to do the same thing again.
This is a bad thing.
Now, granted five years is plenty of time to make the move. But it's still time and effort that could have spent on something else. Having to switch because HP didn't want to support their software going forward wouldn't make me more inclined to buy from HP in the future. Basically, HP has proven that their software is not a safe bet.
It's not a calculator company. Calculators are the gnat on the ass of this $49 Billion elephant.
It's not Test and Measurement. That's Agilent.
It's not 83 different companies.
It's one company, it has a strategy, and whether you like it or not, OpenMail does not fit this strategy.
HP will probably take the relevant parts of OpenMail and the great engineers working on it and focus them on contributing to the strategy.
Nowhere in the HP Way does it state that HP has to please everybody all the time. This includes employees and customers.
What it DOES say in the HP way is that HP will be ethical and fair. It will continue to support its OpenMail customers (or make sure that they are supported) while at the same time admitting that this is a dead-end product for HP and you are free to go elsewhere. And if you want help getting there, call HP and they will do anything from pointing you to Exchange or Sendmail or Notes or whatever to sending an army of HP consultants out to hold your hand.
HPUX in a museum? Hardly, it is one of only 3 operating systems to be running on IA64 currently and about the only real option for large boxes. (w2k and linux being the other two)
You Like Science?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
Wouldn't it make more sense to opensource it when they get into that final support-only phase? Why spend money maintaining software after you've stopped selling it?
TradeServer and TradeSuite are a possible alternative, not only to Openmail, but to Exchange:
There's an FAQ and then some, at http://www.teledyn.com/products/TradeSuite/. No, I haven't used it or deployed it. But I thought it would be worth mentioning.Who rated this "flamebait"? I'd rate it "funny".
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
Egads that's a sexist remark!
Yes, that could be a sexist remark, except that the real sexist issue is that there are few, if any, other woman CEO's in tech industries? Why is that?
Unlike the more traditional societies across the Pacific or Atlantic, where woman are expected to keep house, bear children and look good, in the US woman are expected to compete in the marketplace, and they have been expected to compete since feminism started in the '60s. That's almost 40 years ago, plenty of time for women to work their way up the corporate ladders, yes, the number of women CEO's in tech companies could probably be counted on one hand. Why?
Could it be the oft invoked glass ceiling? Could it be latent sexism on the part of the existing patriarchy? Are women less good (overall) at the tech things (This is not a slam at women, most geeks appear to suffer from borderline Auspergers sydrone, where they get obsessed over an os, or a technology, and play with it until they know it inside and out, to the exclusion of personal hygeine and social lives. Woman tend to treat things a little more balanced, thankfully.)? I don't know, but I think the real sexist remark is that 50% of our population is not reflected in the boardroom.
Furthermore, I think it would be interesting to know what kind of open source OpenMail was based on. Suppose it was GPL-ed code, that would mean HP could be forced to open things up. But I don't think that will be the case, I can't imagine a company like HP violating GPL like that. Still it would be interesting to know where the fundaments of OpenMail came from.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
What makes you think that HP isn't developing HP-UX? I support HP-UX machines and they are still coming out with new versions. While HP-UX tends to lag the gee-wiz cutting edge stuff like SunOS, it is ten times more stable than SunOS.
Actually, if they were willing to provide support (for $$$) open-sourcing the program would be an extremely smart move. As Eric Raymond explains in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by open-sourcing the project they get free developement and bug fixing. And by providing support services, they can make a ton of money without investing sunk developement costs. While you may raise the objection that other companies could also provide support, HP would not only have the cred (it has been their project) but also has the support service infrastructure set up. These two advantages would ensure that they were primary support providers for the near future. Given this, they would get the mucho moola of support services, without the hassle of developement. Sound like a good deal?
I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, oh, wait...
But you know.. they have a high-profile open source advocate amongst their staff (Bruce Perens).
Is it beyond the realms of possibility that he could stop badgering the printer engineers for five minutes, and go and badger the bosses of the software developers??
Who knows...
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
...give away code?
Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code.
It is highly likely that much of the code in open mail will be reused in a future product. If not the code itself at least the technologies contained within it.
I think mainly I am sick and tired that every chance people get they want something for nothing and get angry if they don't get it. There is good arguments for letting everyone use the knowledge to try and make newer and cooler things that will advance society, but there is also a pretty good argument that if you spent your time and resources to create something, that thing is yours to distribute how you see fit.
I guess what is really awful in the open source world is that the people that really annoy me aren't the ones I should be listening to. I know that many of the people developing open source projects do a TON of work on thier own and come a long way in providing alternatives for the world and not asking anything in return. Could those people who are a positive force in Open Source get rid of all the whining gnits that keep shouting "Give me your software and your mp3's!" so that I can renew my faith in the motives of the Open Source world.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I gave up on the Notes GUI when R5 came out, after years of gnashing my teeth over Lotus' UI fecklessness.
Lotus has always had UI problems, such as incomprensible dialogs and wacky task flows, but but R5 took the cake. I could imagine the crack smoking marketroids scheming this one out: Hey, we'll make it look like a web browser so it will be easy to use! (Hey, I think AutoCad should have a web browser interface so it will be easy to use!).
The old tabbed interface of Notes worked great, it was especially liked by newbie users. The great irony is that the most usable of the complex web sites (Amazon) uses a tabbed folder metaphor.
Is it too much to task for a huge company like IBM to just hire a few HCI experts?
I think the Domino server rocks, though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sound like a good deal?
Sure. Trouble is, even with an application as crucial as this (groupware) where there is no current alternative in the open source area, open-sourcing it is no guarantee that other developers will join and help.
Look at Sun's/Stardivision's office suite and at Netscape's browser. Both application types are very important, yet both are mostly fostered by in-house developers.
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Does anybody remember HP New Wave ?
- Address Book: Use a standard LDAP server.
- Mail: Use a standard IMAP server. BTW: Pop3 should be sufficient in most cases.
- Scheduling: Set up a FTP server where on which the users can exchange their Free/Busy data.
- Public Folders: Someone ever heard of an Intranet or News servers?
- Out of office: OK, that's harder to realize. Create a web interface that writes a message on their UNIX-Email accounts and uses vacancy.
OK, this requires the users to do some more configuration tasks on their clients (setup LDAP, MAIL and FTP), but despite this: Which features are you missing?1) As it is all open source, there is nothing to stop others muscling in on this so-called "lucrative" support deal, undercutting HP and generally significantly reducing HP's income from support.
Yes, there is nothing stopping others from providing support in addtion to HP. However, this has been HP's project for years. If I was a sysanalyst, I'd go with the company that has the most experience with the software, rather than an upstart.
2) HP would no longer have control over the source per se, nor would they directly know what was happening to it unless the spend time (and hence money) to keep looking at what's going on - makes supporting a product bloody difficult when you have no control over it and don't know what's being done to it - the only way to know is to pay lots of people to watch the development, and if you are going to invest thatsort of time, money and manpower then you may as well just develop it inhouse for less cost anyway.
Yes they would have to spend money in keeping up with the software as it is revised, but the money they would make from support would easily offset this. (If it were otherwise, I doubt there would be many software consultants around.)
You seem also to contradict yourself, you say that the costs involved in keeping up the revisions would be prohibitive, yet in your first point you assert that other companies could muscle in on HP's support business. If HP couldn't afford keeping up with the revisions (which I strongly disagree with), certainly a company without any prior knowledge of the software couldn't afford it either.
Also, I must contest your statement that inhouse developement would cost less. Understand that all developement costs are sunk; you don't get them back.
I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, oh, wait...
I saw this posting, and thought that, if nothing else, the MAPI code might benefit the open source community in general, or the OGS project specifically.
I followed the link in the story to the OpenMail home page, and then the OpenMail contact us link.
I asked them to consider Open Sourcing the product at end of life. I asked them nicely. (If you do this, please ask nicely, too.)
I explained that there are projects that could benefit from their work, and asked them to consider that as a possibility.
Here's the automated response I got from them. I'm looking forward to a 'real' answer, too.
Re: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Thank you for your enquiry.
As stated on our Assistance web page, we are pleased to respond to anything to do with HP OpenMail. Allowing for time differences around the world, we aim to respond to messages within 48 hours. If a full response is likely to take longer than this, or the volume of mail exceeds our expectations, we will still get back to you within 48 hours to tell you when you might expect a full response. (Please note that we can only provide responses to inquiries composed in English.)
If you have submitted an inquiry that is not related to HP OpenMail, we will forward your inquiry to the appropriate HP organization. Because different HP organizations provide different product support options, you should consult the Assistance page related to your inquiry to understand what type of support you can expect. To help find the appropriate on-line Assistance page, please use the Assistance directory page.
Thank you again for contacting us
The HP OpenMail team
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you would like to know more about this, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
You can get the source code to OpenMail by paying some large sum of cash and signing a NDA. But that's only part of the problem.
The real issue is Openmail is a 12 year old product. And at the very base of the is a DB server that was produced by a company that's no longer in existance. It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
This is not to say that a source distro couldn't be made. However, someone would have to sign an agreement with HP to take responcibility to remove the items HP doesn't have the rights too and replace them with GNU/GLP/Whatever items.
Really, a RedHat or a Suse would need to step in I think in order to get this done. Most likely redhat because that's what the current Linux version is written to.
An alternative might be the iPlanet Messaging Server which even offers a migration tool from Exchange. Siemens used this to replace Exchange. I do not know this Messaging Server, but maybe you might want to check it out.
I spent my summer internship at HP helping to prepare for HP's migration to Exchange from OpenMail -- rewriting a messenging backend to use SMTP and LDAP rather than depend on OpenMail and a proprietary directory service.
HP's been preparing for this move since last summer, and made the final switch to Exchange on November 1. Why continue work on a project that the companies internal IT doesn't even think enough of to use?
This would be a massive win for OSS... Imagine Evolution with an Openmail plugin, or even *gasp* with an Exchange plugin???
I don't want to light you up here. But, there is a well documented single user restore method. You just need to set the system up correctly ahead of time. See HP documents titled "Single User Restore".
I think people expect a lot of HP openmail, and don't consider that you're running many more accounts per server than exchange. Things take time. If you attach a V-series HP-9000 to a EMC, plug in Omni back you've now created a e-mail system that requires no down time for back-up. Create a temp third mirror, run OM suspend, break the mirror off, start backing up. All the uses notice was a 15 second pause. A system like that could support at least 8000 connections, and most likely a user base of 14,000+.
Mail forwarding is based on a simple file. You can turn it off and on with about 15 lines of code to figure out where the files are kept and single SED command to flip around the auto actions.
This is not to say it's for the faint of heart, but since it's Unix based there isn't a lot you can't do. Writing scripts to automate you're daily proccess is a big deal for a good system. You have to be willing to read the all the docs (between the manual and the OTNs you're looking at 1000+ pages of stuff. But hey, that's what flexible monolithic email systems are all about.
HP OM does have bugs in it certainly, and it doesn't walk on water. But the issues you listed can be overcome. Some of them are even well documented.
--
It's really the poor craftsman who blames his tools.
The HP Apollo inkjet, color and BW, is selling at the local albertsons out here (OR,US) for about $40. DOes photo paper and ink. on a side note though printer makers don't make money on the printers. Its the $2.00 ink cart that sells for $50 that they make the dough on.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
ring ring
Mbait: Hello?
HPperson: Hi, this is HPperson. Our mail servers are down again. Could you please send that file to my home email account?
It seems some VP IT guy thinks Microsoft is God's gift to HP. Sure, they have made lots of money selling PC's, but to switch over such a big company to Exchange is madness.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Its the ink they mark up 1000% that they make money on. They could give the printer away and still make money on the ink.
To a full open source solution. phpGroupWare
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
As for old ladies.. well the 3 secretaries in my area (all old, all serve directors and VPs) can't even figure out how to print in color.
Oh and good luck with that personality of yours!We have open codecs for realplayer, quicktime, mpeg4/divx. Not counting the normal ones ftp/http/smtp/pop/etc...
Seems by now, someone would have an opensource method or reverse engineer of exchange.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace. HP needs a museum for leading tech they've developed that they stopped supporting. In this museum they can inlude the HPUX UNIX version, Open Mail, their optical storage units, and their partnershipped with Bell Packard-Bell computers.
It's a shame, the only product they're good at selling (the HP laserjets) have their imaging engines made in Japan by Canon. It's almost a painful metaphor for America, original products are no longer sold, and only rebadged Japanese products are keeping the company afloat.
Wish the open source community luck on this one. It would be a great product for free software/open source developers to take over.
I think the DOJ ought to investigate this as a possible anti-trust violation by Microsoft. All evidence seems to point that Microsoft killed this product to stifle competition.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Considering the effort HP seem to have been putting into OpenMail (& Linux - I have the T Shirt!) it seems a shame to suddenly drop it. A shame, as I might have been a potential customer in about 6 months time, but if it's a dead end...
This could be a big loss - a strong (compatible) competitor to Exchange with huge potential, just fading into history.
But if open sourced, it could be one of the biggest wins in years. Imagine the inroads Open Source could make on Exchange starting with OpenMail... any thoughts on how we could plant the 'suggestion' with HP?
Now, if all those fail, the next step might be to opensource it, but I think that would be after they are done supporting it.
--
Free Mac Mini
ok then why, when you go to amazon.com, and scroll to the bottom of the page, does it say "powered by hp"???
-----Original Message-----
From: openmail@hp.com
To: tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
Sent: 3/2/01 5:54 AM
Subject: RE: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Hello Tom,
Thanks for getting on touch. This is something that everyone is asking
for at the moment. Any news that we have will get posted on our website.
Kind Regards
OpenMail Helpdesk
-----Original Message-----
From: tom.cooper [mailto:tom_cooper@bigfoot.com]
Sent: 01 March 2001 16:37
To: HELPDESK OPENMAIL
Subject: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Name: Tom Cooper
Email: tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
Phone: (301)380-7057
State: MD
Country: USA
Comment:
If this is the last release of this product, would you consider open
sourcing it? I am a technology professional who likes to see options
- we're stuck with Exchange because of the proprietary MAPI protocols.
Would it be possible to GPL this code (or a similar license) so that we
could be free from the MS back end?
I'm involved peripherally with an open source effort to create an open
groupware product, and I think that this product could help with that
and many other efforts.
Thanks for taking the time to read this message. I'm interested to
hear what you have to say about this possibility.
Regards,
Tom Cooper
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Hello...
I know these messageboards probably aren't really for posting 'want ads' but here goes.
HardwareDesk, previously known as CTNews3D.com, is looking for a few more writers. We need a few that are tech-savvy, smart, and obviously good with computer hardware and software.
We are also looking for news updaters. These people will update the main page of the web site with web content and blurbs about random reviews.
CTNews3D had been receiving 24,000 visitors a day, with spikes up to 50-70,000 visitors a day.
HardwareDesk will be a part of the CTNewsNET network of web sites.
Please contact Jason if you are interested @ webmaster@ctnews3d.com
Appreciate it
Jason Lutjen
Does it seem strange to you that HP would simultaneously issue a new version of a product, and let potential buyers know that support is going to be killed in a finite amount of time?
It seems to me this is counter productive... What possible benefit would this have as far as the marketing of this product?
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
..the company is just going to pot since William Hewlett died..
With all the problems Hp is facing maybe it want's to concentrate on other core areas. Specially when the market is so unkind.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Are their any alternatives to Openmail that support the address books and other fancy useless features that management requires us to use that are in MS Outlook without using MS Exchange Server? I have sendmail running but it just provides basic email send/receive, it doesn't support sharing MS Outlook address books. I understand its some sort of LDAP/Samba share, but I am unable to figure out the configuration, but Openmail is the only mail server I am aware of that supports all the fancy features of MS Outlook other then MS Exchange server.. All their any alternatives to Openmail that support all these extra features in MS Outlook other then MS Exchange Server that I can use on Linux?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
and I just rolled out the first of many planned production servers using Openmail. sigh. hope it goes open source.
---
I post links to stuff here
Well, for a webmail software that uses the UNIX spools directly, you could try Neomail. neomail.sourceforge.net
Hugo
Is it just her, or are all woman CEO's like this, afraid of a little competition?
That was an uncool, sexist, fucked up thing to say. Just so you know.
--
Software companies that abandon their products don't get my respect. If a particular company has a history of abandoning its products, then why should I trust them when they try to sell me their existing products?
Whatever you say about Microsoft, those guys from Redmont rarely ditch one of their babies. (I am not trying to start a flame war here, so don't send me a list of products that MS has abandoned. Those products are a very small percentage of the total number of products that they are working on.)
If you want to be taken seriously, fight till death, no matter what.
Galactic Geek
* * * Free programmers? Why not? http://www.Geeks4Free.com * * *
This was previously mentioned at Slashdot in a prior OpenMail story. This Summit Strategies, March 20, 1997 page may be of interest as well:
Looks as if MSFT may have exploited HP in the past to fend off competition in the enterprise communications market.
My own read of the current action: Bruce is quite possibly right, there is too much third-party baggage in OpenMail for it to be a successesful free software play. However, opening up core APIs to the free software movement, particularly for projects such as OpenFlock or Evolution could be very helpful. Still, I've got to say that Don Marti's analysis smells strongly of truth.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Is there a freeware / shareware reliece of this product?
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
Its enterprise computing division is getting hammered by Sun and IBM, and no one really considers them serious supporters of linux - their support is just another bandwagon-hopping exercise to buy some PR.
With printers selling for $39 at the grocery store, they have basically become disposable - its going to be impossible for HP to compete in this market.
was the HP16C calculator - the only real programming calculator ever made. On eBay the 16C goes for high prices - not to collectors, but to people who needs a great calculator to use for work. All the later HP calculators sucks as a programmers calculator :-(
You do have reference for that story, don't you?
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
be sure to read the part about openmail generating 'friction' with their microsoft relations.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com [mailto:Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 2:42 PM
Cc: Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com
Subject: OpenMail Future Beyond 7.0
Hi All,
Some of you have already been informed of recent decisions regarding
the future of OpenMail, but I wanted to make sure that all of you
received the news. A letter went out to the OpenMail installed base
today to inform them of the developments and I wanted to make sure
that you had the letter as well in case you were contacted about it
(see attached).
The bottom line is that the next release of OpenMail, v7.0, will be
the last release to include new features and functionality. Beyond
OpenMail 7.0, the only releases provided will be to provide bug fixes.
Hewlett-Packard will continue to support OpenMail 6.0 and 7.0 for the
next 5 years for any existing and new customers. Version 7.0 is
expected to be available off the OpenMail website by next week.
Given HP's new software strategy, OpenMail would be the only end-user
application in a middleware software stack. That coupled with
OpenMail's strength vis a vis Exchange, creates friction to HP's
Microsoft partnership and PC related revenue.
OpenMail has been the most reliable, scaleable, flexible, feature
rich, and the lowest total cost to own and operate messaging and
collaboration server software on the market. Version 7.0 continues
this claim and is still a viable option for customers looking for a
messaging server to start with or as a replacement for exchange.
The new business part of the OpenMail team will no longer be in place
as of March 1st, which includes myself. I have enjoyed working with
OpenMail and working to provide you and your organization with an HP
solution that meets with you and your customer's needs. I have
appreciated your support and look forward to working with you or your
organization again in the future. If there is anything I can do this
week, please let me know and I will do whatever I can. If you need to
reach me for anything else or to just keep in touch, I can be found at
bruce_hollamby@yahoo.com.
Best regards,
Bruce
_______________________________________
Bruce Hollamby
Channel Program Manager
OpenMail Operation
Hewlett-Packard Company
19410 Homestead Rd., MS 43UE
Cupertino, CA 95014
Phone: +1-408-447-5132
Fax: +1-408-447-5816
Cellular: +1-408-839-8050
Email: mailto:bruce_hollamby@hp.com
Check out http://www.hp.com/go/OpenMail
Some facts.
.pst file.
1) OpenMail support sucks. The people are very friendly and knowledgeble, but when it comes time to make a bugfix? 3-9 months leadtime. Unacceptable.
2) OpenMail MAPI is horrible. It is basically a crude way of network storing a
3) OpenMail IMAP is mediochre. Problems with MIME over IMAP leads to a virtually unusable IMAP service.
4) OpenMail uses some 500 binary executables. A nightmare to understand how to use, unless one is a seasoned OpenMail guru. Each has a slightly different command syntax as well...
5) OpenMail LDAP is somewhat cumbersome to configure. Most commercial products have a built-in LDAP connector to it's internal directory engine. OpenMail doesn't do this the same way, one has to configure LDAP with some seriously cryptic configuration files.
6) OpenMail takes about a good 2 days to get up and running to an acceptable level of performance. A normal messaging solution takes about a half day.
Now... Here is a golden opportunity for Lotus! Write an OpenMail migration kit and arrange with HP to offer a competitive upgrade license from OpenMail. The matter should thereby be closed case. Another 5% of the total messaging market.
I feel cheated by HP. It has gladly taken my money for support, subscriptions and excessive licensing fees. Only to receive this back... IMHO, Ms Carly has turned HP into a PC pusher and a flimsy InkJet printer manufacturer... Very sad indeed.
Alex
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I am currently working on a contract for HP in Roseville CA.
Last summer we were forced to migrate to exchange.
The only hold-outs are the HP-UX engineers.
They are still using the open-view suite.
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
Check out Intermail from Openwave. They have a corporate and a large-scale solution. Intermail includes an LDAP server, message store, mta, queue servers, etc.. it's a very nice setup, and is ported to most unix flavors.
Here's a link.
Don't even think about iPlanet, that project is a complete disaster. Sun's crappy product plus Netscape's crappy message store = one shitty product. I don't know why intermail isn't mentioned on slashdot, it is the best unix mail software.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Not even AutoCAD is safe. Their new "i" versions are "Internet Driven" Its new features have drawn the ire of our CAD people.
And to think that they actually charged full price for this "upgrade!"
zsazsa
About a year ago, my company was looking to replace our Exchange servers with OpenMail. We needed them to co-exist for a while and for it to be transparent (function-wise) to the end users (many of whom are using Outlook). OpenMail just couldn't do it. Not with 100% functionality. We had OM sales engineers come to our site to help, but they just went away without solving the problem. Finally, when the last SE was here and couldn't solve the problems, he told us on the way out that it was probably good that we weren't going with OM anyway as MS was applying a lot of pressure on the HP execs to stop OM as it was too much cometition. This was one of the reasons why a lot of the integration issues we had seen had not been fixed (they were old issues). He even hinted that he thought that OM would be canceled soon.
Finally, we found a whole lot of docs out there on how to transition from OM to Exchange, but nothing on how to go from Exchange to OM. =8[
I firmly believe that this is more evidence on MS using their monopoly in one area to influence another. Now, how much is due to pressure and how much is due to ineptitude, I don't know.
pete
I don't know about OpenMail but this sounds very similar to what happened to IBM's OS/2 and SmartSuite office suite.
That's not something I wanted to hear. I would have liked to implement it. Now that they're giving up, I don't think anyone would want to move to it.
Don't give up *all* hope, however. There is a little known product from Bynari called TradeServer. It's compatible with Outlook (100% I'm told), $500 for unlimited users, runs on Linux, and (here's the kicker) the fully featured UNIX client is open source. They even host it on SourceForge.
It doesn't have PGP support yet, but the client is quite impressive, usable as a standalone client.
I don't know why nobody has been mentioning it here, though.
So for all of you that have been trying to stave off that management push for an Exchange install by showing them OpenMail info (like I have), here's a solution they might like (plus they wouldn't know the difference if you just installed it, wink, wink).
I heard they even switched their own internal servers from OpenMail to Exchange, which seems to have been causing chaos within HP a couple of weeks ago.
I wonder what Micros~1 has offered HP in return for taking a competing product off the market.
The true open source replacement for both OpenMail and Exchange is Citadel. It's rapidly shaping up to be a real Exchange killer. Powerful multithreaded server, transactional data store, POP and SMTP currently working, IMAP by the end of the year... bulletin boards, chat, instant messaging... clients in development for multiple platforms, web-based access already here... We're also planning on doing a MAPI connector similar to the one that HP wrote for OpenMail.
Citadel has already reached a point where people are starting to implement non-trivial projects on top of it. Come join the fun and help us stab MS in the back like they did to HP!
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
And a little more work on the Notes GUI wouldn't hurt, either.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
I hope that someday we will see a truly viable open source alternative to MS Exchange. Exchange has some good concepts, but a horrible implementation. A portable, modular system could create a wonderful foundation for an information transfer, storage, and sharing architecture. Unfortunatlely, I don't see any serious efforts to create one at this time.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Speaking as a sysadmin who has to deal with this krufty, irritating, godawful product on a daily basis, I am entirely relieved that we'll soon have to port to something else. (Mmmmm... Exim....) Openmail isn't all it's cracked up to be. The internal logic is insane. It does about seventeen disk writes every time you send a message. Restoring a single user's account involves restoring the ENTIRE SYSTEM from tape and exporting that user. Speaking of which, exporting a user's mailstore can take HOURS if they have a few megs of mail in there. And its administrative support is just generally crappy... there are no commandline tools for, for instance, turning someone's forwarding on or off. Trust me, you folks are better off not having to deal with it.
Very recently, I'd been in the market for a new enterprise messaging server to replace our companies Exchange 5.5 server, and I looked very long and hard at OpenMail. What I found, made me sad.
OpenMail seems to have been marketed as a direct competitor to Exchange, but the reality of it's abilities falls short of this claim. I was sorely disappointed, since I wanted to move away from a windows-based solution.
From the recent beta I was using, all OpenMail is is an SMTP server, with an integrated POP/IMAP server and a web-base mail client application. Missing is all the calendaring, folder synchronization, and all the other schwag that makes Outlook so damned popular with the corporate crowd. I was sad, because if this was the best that there was to offer, the appropriate choice was obvious.
Does anyone else know of any application suites which come closer? I've looked in vain...
Couple things to keep in mind about OpanMail. It's not a US HP product. It's a UK HP product. The developers there do things very well, but aren't always thought of well by the US team. That being said here's how MS crushed OpenMail.
Back in the day before lotus alienated the cc:Mail user base OpenMail was the king of cross platform e-mail systems. It could talk to cc:Mail Clients, Lotus Notes, MS Mail, and Exchange (Back when exchange was a very young and imature product). IBM even resold OpenMail with an IBM label on it. Openmail ran on the three major Unix platforms of the day. HP, Sun, IBM. One day the engineers at pinewood had a great idea. Let's do an NT port.
And so it began. HP went through the normal product life cycle and actually sold a production NT version...for exactly one quarter.
So what happened to that version? Ahh, here in lies the monopoly play. See, MS got wind of Openmail for NT. While it was still a rev 1 product and had several bugs, there was no doubt the feature set was there and with in a year HP would have a product that would crush exchange with a decent price and a feature set MS wouldn't have for another three years.
So, the story told by the engineers at pinewood is basically this. MS goes to HP and says if you continue with the product you're out compedition and we will no longer be including you in any partner programs. Now HP makes far more money on selling NT based servers, Raids, and all the service and support that goes with the products then it does on one software product. And being cut out of early releases and not having drivers and hardware certified would kill the business.
So, HP, after investing a lot of time and money into a port, kills it. And thus loses a major market. If you don't think that's abusing monopoly power, I don't know what is.
Many users place a value on commercial software, where that value is proportional to the amount of support they expect to receive in the future. (Thus, they view it as a service even if it is actually a product.) (There are exceptions to this, of course.)
If HP orphans the product in such a way that the users suddenly expect no more support, then they will be unhappy. Releasing the source is a way to mitigate that unhappiness.
The calls for opening the source to abandoned products, are therefore mostly justified not by Open Source development values (developers who "want the crown jewels" for free), but by Free Software values (the desire to protect the users). Of course, once a rallying cry is heard, plenty of Open Source guys happily jump on the bandwagon -- yes, hoping to get something for nothing.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Speaking as somebody who works for one of iPlanet's competitors (Sendmail), I've come across several people who have installed it and none of them seem to like it very much.
For groupware, the only real competitor to Exchange is Lotus Notes. If you just want an IMAP mail server, there are loads in existence (including ours), many of which are open source. There are also separate calendaring suites if you want that functionality.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
is a groupware alternative.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Dude, you have to understand that its all relative to the almighty dollar.
Trust me i work in retail and deal with hp's products. They permeate every market where they can make a profit - HP printers, scanners, computers, monitors, CD burners, paper, CD-R's, CD-R label maker kits, Iron On T-Shirt transfers, the list goes ON AND ON, they're probably the best branded name with the most permiation in the entire store. And you always pay a premium for the HP name on it - lexmark printers with better resolution cost less, microtek scanners that do 24X12@42bit cost what 12X6@36bit scanners from HP cost.
So if you think that they got scared by competition with Exchange server, you clearly have not got a grasp of modern economics. These people spend Billions each year on marketing, market research, and R&D. If OpenMail had been economically feasable, they would have marketed it. As it is, they must have realized that there was little to no money to be made in a resonable amount of time, versus cost of maintaining a software package that is mission critical to a major company, and creating new releases of it so that it grows with the economy, making sure it is infinately scaleable, etc.
If they had thought they could get one red cent out of this, they would be pushing it in the corporate face of america.
You always have to ask what the bottom line is. And its always money.
~zero
insert clever line here
sig?