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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.
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.
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.
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...
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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.
...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,"
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Free Mac Mini
You do have reference for that story, don't you?
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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
Regarding Open Source for this product, sure, I'd like to see it happen and we've been discussing it for months. But I can not say anything definite and if it happens it will take a while.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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!
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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.
It's... it's...
Ethical Behavior(TM).