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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."
What web based calendar does everyone use? We have been using WebCalendar(spiffy name eh?) and it works ok, but the interface is kinda hokie looking (plus it is waaaaay too busy). Anyone else have any preferences?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
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
You can run the Hula calendar separately from the mailer/MTA. We definitely want to follow the one-problem one-tool rule for people who want that.
just don't show your boss the citadel logo on the page
I'm a (newish, but still) software engineer at Novell, and I'd like to answer your questions quickly from my little point of view.
The rationale behind this is that we'd like to put out something that's simple at first but can seed an ecosystem of its own, and, with some luck, one day become "the Apache of collaboration". Netmail was a good fit because there were very few issues IP-wise in releasing the code, and because it's a young and extensible base that has the potential to evolve into a killer enterprise-level system. If we were to open up GroupWise, for example, (if that were even possible, which it isn't) we'd be saying to the world "hey, come on and help out with our finished, mature product", which isn't nearly as stimulating as "hey, come on and help shape the future of collaboration!" The latter may be a smidge optimistic, but that's honestly what we're shooting for, if I understand Nat correctly.
As for transferring development of Netmail to the open Hula project, here's what I know and (I hope!) am allowed to say: Netmail was a very small team. The Hula team is bigger. So no, we're not just tossing it out and watching to see who in the OSS community should be the project leader. It's still our project, though everybody is free to fork if they decide we're headed in the wrong direction. That does two things: it forces us to stay honest and on the up-and-up with the OSS community, and (as of right now, no turning back) it gives to the world a useful piece of free software that can and will get more and more useful over time.
There was a joke made in the hallways here (and possibly elsewhere in these comments) in reference to South Park. Step 1: Release Hula. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!
Step 2 is to play the game right, to give OSS folks what they want and what they need to help us build (or build themselves, if they so desire) a really sweet communications system. Something that there would be demand for at the enterprise level. Right now, Hula is mail and calendar. A year from now, I would be very surprised if it did not include IM, some form of VOIP, and some things I can't even imagine right now. Apache, QT, MySQL, and so on have shown that there is money to be made from a free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer tool if: 1) It's good, and 2) An ecosystem develops around it. That money, of course, is what Novell is looking for in the end, and I've got to say I'm pretty excited to see the way we're going after it. Microsoft built a proprietary community around Exchange, and it has dominated collaboration for years. I'm rooting for Hula's free, open community that was officially born today.
So there's two cents from a rookie Novell programmer.
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.
Yeah, this is a very fair point. You can run separate components of Evolution separately with the -c option, e.g. "evolution -c calendar" gives you only the calendar.
We have considered splitting Evolution into separate projects a number of times, and it may still happen.
That's "robo secretary". It's an idea for a feature. We couldn't think of what to call it.
See the "robosecretary" part on this page:
http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/Text
The two are not mutually exclusive. Many vendors do this (open-sourcing a product and selling it commercially.)
The key is that people want support when they get a product. This way, Novell can capitalize on the development of the product, then sell it to people and support it. It makes sense, really.
And yes, it looks like an Exchange replacement, as it has integrated mail and calendaring. That's basically why people go to exchange. Add in tasks, contacts, and a few other things, and that's Exchange in a nutshell.
It eats up ram and cpu time like a zombie Reagan chewing his way through an all you can eat buffet of cheap steak and junk bonks. Two or three users was enough to take a trial install on an ultra-60 (dual proc, 1gb ram) to its knees in our experience. And like the other reply said, the user interface is a close adherent of the Mystery Meat Navigation and Angry Fruit Salad Color Scheme design schools.
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.'"
Amazingly enough, it is in fact quite possible to input this data yourself. Plus, you get to save your company potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because it is possible to have a calendar without having it tightly integrated with email.
Also quite interesting, is that I do run a network of a large number of machines, and nobody has ever seen the need to have this functionality. Everything that Outlook does can be done with seperate apps, and can often be done better. If the people you work with are so lazy/busy that they can't switch tasks to their calendar, then they likely aren't able to do their jobs anyway. Either that, or the IT department was completely inept in their implementation. Sounds to me like yet another case of it needing to be that way because that's the way it "always" was.
In all honesty, the calendar integration with Outlook, Notes, and so many others is just convenient. It isn't at all necessary, as you can do everything within the calendar system and only use email for notifications.
You only need the integration because Microsoft said so, and since Microsoft said so, it has to be that way. Of course, the Start menu is also the most efficient interface, and nothing could be better than Word for doing on-screen layout. *That* mentality is why software hasn't advanced much in so long.
I know someone that deals with the occasional week that he has over fifty meetings, sometimes more. He'll sometimes have fifteen in a day. He uses a paper calendar and an appointment schedule for the day. This is possible because people that have that many meetings also tend to have an administrative assistant.
The silly calendar integration has been a point to keep Microsoft entrenched for years, and the argument still is no better than when it started. There's a million reasons why it isn't necessary, and only one as to why it is.