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Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code
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."
yawn
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.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Loser.
"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.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
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?
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:(
hopefully this app will work better than a certain other webmail named after a rodent with a big bushy tail.
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.
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.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
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?
.ics files, I can subscribe to various calendars via webcal:// URLs.
That is, in iCal which uses WebDAV to store
Is CalDAV the 'official' way of doing this?
I'd like to remind everyone that the Citadel project 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 widely regarded as too cumbersome to implement properly. GroupDAV is the upcoming standard -- not only is it simpler to implement (resulting in fewer buggy implementations) but it also supports all the usual groupware object types -- not only calendars, but tasks, contacts (using vCard), etc. GroupDAV support is currently in beta for Kontact, Evolution, Citadel, and OpenGroupware.org. Go check that out too.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I see on their Calendar idea mind map, in the lower left is 'Rob Secretary'
How many lines for Novell Linux?
.. 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.
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).
Some will always be above others. Destroy the equality today, and it will appear again tomorrow. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Looks like myrealbox.com just became myrealslowbox.com. Thanks /.!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
Look slike someones trying to break in. The 'wrong password' count is climbing pretty steady.
2652 -> 2702 in about a minute.
Erm but you did have backup, didn't you?
Learn it, HA is not enough, RAID is not enough, do your backups. Do your restoring praxises. Backup you r filesystems, databases.
Be proactive. Use recent application bases (upgrade your php/sql/javacontainer/java). Set the debugging level high, and read your logs, analyze them. Monitor and control your system. Ah yes, and keep the KISS rule.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
It's called security! I don't want to sync my iFolder somewhere I have no control over.
Funny meeting you here, Mr. Plugmeister!
Hula isn't abandonware. It is anything *but*. You have no idea what you are talking about.
.... You're not gonna be able to get any of these in a MS shop.
Unfortunate but true.
just don't show your boss the citadel logo on the page
iFolder is peer-to-peer. (altho it can also be done via server)
Hula is more than a webmail front-end, it is also the server.
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.
I thought so too, and started 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 ).
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I'm still waiting for the Exchange killer. This look s close, but its still not there. As much as it pains me, I routinely recommend Exchange to my clients that need shared calendaring, shared contacts, a Windows client (no web stuff), and PDA sync. My clients are lawyers, accountants, and insurances agencies. All are huge users of all these features, and I can't just say "Use linux on the desktop". In the real world this all has to work in windows, and the only solution I can find in Exchange/Outlook.
I wish the hula people good luck, but there is a long way to go to match Exchange in features.
Let the flame war begin!
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.
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.
Myddrin
I just checked my myrealbox account for the first time in about a year. over 500 spam messages...
I just pulled hula of their svn server and guess what? It doesn't compile. Apparently novel forgot to include definition of atomic_inc and atomic_dec macros. Has anyone else had this problem?
l a_have_any_significant_dependencies.3F
For the sake of compleatness I'm building this on a nearly fresh fedora 3 box + reacent updates that I use for my daily work (devel). Novel claims no external dependencies are needes as can be seen here: http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/FAQ#Does_Hu
openwebmail does already all of it, and much more, apart from having not being officially tested for heavy use.
hula hasn't mail filter, so it cannot be considered as desktop replacement.
gmail has the abstract of the first lines of the message, and nor hula neither any other opensource or closed source webmail application seems to have this simple feature.
i couldn't see either if hula supports a javascript WYSIWYG rich text editor. or international spellchecking.
i use openwebmail as desktop replacement (web)mail application so i can have my sent-email folder always synchronized independently if i work home, office or elsewhere.
i wonder how many lines of code are needed to implement such features in hula or openwebmail.org...
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. We have a wide variety of webmail solutions, I like Horde/IMP a lot.
5. We lack, in part, an interoperable calendaring framework, which was the Citadel person's point. But we don't totally lack that either, cf OpenGroupware--and Netmail/Hula appears to be playing catch-up
Matt
Or rebirth, think about it, the older usenet gets the less knowen and used it is becomeing these days, soon it wont be worth the time of spamers as only the l33t soto speek will b euseing usenet, and then the signle to noise ratio might rise just enough to have a decent arguemtn over whos the hotest starwars babe =>
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I searched for other groupware servers in Footnotes, and at least OpenGroupware was subject of an article. No bias here. But Planet Gnome marketing really seems to be a little overboard...
Fortunate enough to have 10 MB of storage? Oooh... Aaah...
It will happen.
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.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
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 calendaring and mail client to be tightly integrated, and standardized across the company.
I'm still holding out for the coveted BorderManager code. Not as comfotable, maybe, but much more gratifying than toilet paper.
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!
At least, none that we can see. ;-)
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Between Blackberry and Good, everyone wants to take Outlook with them. E-mail, calendars, contacts, the works. RIM on Blackberry, Good on Treos and Pocket PCs.
Exchange is a no brainer. How you extend it is all the rage now.
What sort of user store do the default MTA and POP/IMAP services use? What store does it use for storing calendar objects and entries?
I suppose this is because OpenGroupware.org actually _has_ the Noodle Evolution connector (as well as Kontact, Mozilla and Outlook connectors).
Hula currently is just one additional web mail client - we have _meriads_ of that on Freshmeat. The website is little but "will have" "will do" "will have" and little actual "does".
Granted, they have hired an excellent designer - which is important for Slashdot marketing - but this doesn't change anything about the actual server.
I maintain a handheld pop/imap client and imho Novell IMAP products are universally terrible at adhering to any standards whatsoever. Their interface is particularly buggy and voilates the RFC3501 (IMAP4rev1) so many times it has the dubious honour of being the only server our client attempts to detect...in order to engage the 20 or so work-arounds in our IMAP parser.
Perhaps they hope the open source community can fix their crappy code? God I sure wish *somebody* would fix it as it would make my life easier...
It might not be abandonware, but I wouldn't bet my job or life on it.
Betting your life on the choice of a webmail package? Who do you run servers for, General Zod?
Whats the relation to Open-Xchange? Since there are no Novell employees working on that, can we assume that it is abandonware?
If I ask Novell for a groupware solution for my 500 user company, will they suggest:
a) Groupwise
b) Hula
c) Open-Xchange
?
Mahalo nui loa
Uh, no. But we all bet _something_ on whatever package we do implement.
I do run mail servers with 10s of 1000s of users, and I certainly think it does matter what we use, don't you think?
Matt
Lets talk about this if Novell _did_ base future versions of NetMail.
...
So far it looks like abandonware, just like SLOX.
Referring to a marketing FAQ or press release list provided by the project itself is no good help
Hula and OpenGroupware.org do not compare well. OGo is a complete and highly functional collaboration suite for business use targetted for some hundreds of IT users while Hula seems to be a simplistic webmail solution for hundreds of thousands of users.
;-)
Personally I don't think that Hula will attract a lot of users given that only few of us need to focus on serving 100.000 users
Functionality is key in the mainstream.
Actually Groupware is a really _sucky_ term. It means nothing and all. If you have some IMAP4 server, people call it groupware (Kolab). If you have some personal webcalendar, people call it groupware (Horde, Hula).
Few actually provide group collaboration features like the conflict detection or appointment proposal in OpenGroupware.org.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've got an account there but it's getting tons of spam.
Does anyone know if I can request a username change or something? I want to keep my account, but change my e-mail address so all the spam bounces.
TIA.
I'm not a Novell sales rep, but I'd have to respond to your question with "That depends on the needs of your 500 user company."
"500 users" isn't enough information to formulate which server software best fits your needs.
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?
Hula isn't a webmail client. it's a mail/calendar server based on Novell's existing NetMail server software (which is used by a number of companies from what I understand - it's also the server software used by myrealbox.com)
NetMail is being opened up and relicensed under the LGPL and being renamed to Hula
I agree. I hearby donate these infinite lines of code to the Open Source moment: yes # > MyContributionToSociety.py
So please specify what information you need to give a recommendation.
Dear Hawaiian Islands, Please cease and desist from using the word "Hula", a trademark of Novell corp. --Novell Legal.
Is it worth making a FreeBSD port for this software?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?
--
make install -not war
has some interesting thoughts on this.
Replying to myself:
e _Structure
http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/Mailbox_Fil
It uses mbox. VERY disappointing. Hopefully there is/will be some sort of plugin structure to get it to support Maildir (without having to use an alternate IMAP store) or a more robust storage format.
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.
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.
Is this competitive with Mitch Kapor's Rhapsody project?
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 should win the legal battle.
Another microsoft company purchased 500 SCO licenses directly from SCO to avoid the potential of litigation, because, as it turns out, 500 licenses is slightly cheaper than the litigation protection insurance.
The DNA Lounge owner comments about the "groupware Hula" (advises/admonishes Nat Friedman on?) and by the ways clarifies about the Netscape-Collabra innards.
...brings back the memories of Fidonet, doesn't it?
Monday night, April 19, we experienced problems on the
Mail@"Sorry, I removed something here" e-mail system. We were able to bring the system
online that evening but related problems caused a system
outage early Tuesday. We brought the vendor on-site. We
made several attempts at recovery but were unsuccessful.
At that point we ran a program to identify all folders
with suspected damage. Approximately five percent of
accounts were affected. If you are receiving this note,
you had one or more folders identified as potentially
damaged.
As you may be aware, the Mail@"Sorry, I removed something here" system was out of service for
approximately 3 hours on the morning and early afternoon of
Wednesday, May 12. A number of folders were adversely affected
by a server crash that required some time to evaluate the scope of
the problem and take corrective action.
A Mail@"Sorry, I removed something here" system outage of approximately one hour during the afternoon of September 28 is being investigated by Office of Information Technology staff members and the product vendor (Novell). During the outage, the system was unavailable for sending or accessing e-mail.
Recently, you received a message to the campus community from
XXXXX XXXXXX, Vice President and Chief Information Officer,
concerning the replacement of the current e-mail system.
Since your account is on Mail@"Sorry, I removed something here", you are receiving this
follow-up message about details of the changeover.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
With regard to a previous article:
This and other similar projects give us an interesting opportunity to compare open-source vs. closed (originally) code quality.
... I find it funny they call this software "Hula", which is swedish slang for masturbation. :-)
That was a different company, whose name escapes me. This company had partnered with Suse to do SLOX, but I would guess that, in anticipation of Novell releasing HULA and moving to that, they decided to open source it - probably to try to get traction.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1