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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.
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.
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.
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).