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."

Comments

Released as LGPL - Are you watching, Sun...?

[donnz]

"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.

And the reason?

[Infinityis]

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?

Re:And the reason?

[Nat Friedman]

Open source hasn't yet succeeded in building a collaboration server that people can actually use in a variety of settings. We want to fill this gap with Hula.

We believe that people mainly just want the basics: mail, calendaring, addressbook, maybe shared documents.

The dominant solutions today -- Exchange and Notes -- are built on a 20-year old design that predates the web. They were intended to be platforms on which you could build tools like expense processing, vacation requests, and other things. This was called "workflow."

Today, those functions are all done on internal web sites. It's just better. Who wants to build on the Exchnage "platform" if they don't have to?

But still companies are stuck with these hopelessly big, complex servers, just to do basic email and calendaring. They are expensive, they are heavyweight. They overdeliver.

So what we want to build with Hula is, in a way, the "Firefox" of collaboration servers. Do the basics, and do them extremely well. Provide an extension system so other people can add things if they want.

Dave Camp is the maintainer of Hula; he has a lot of experience in open source and we think he'll guide the project well. Many of the Novell engineers behind the original code (notably David Smith and Rodney Price) are working on the Hula project and will continue to work on it.

We're serious about making Hula work. Stop by #hula on freenode if you want to meet us.

Re:Web-based email? Oh, that's sooo exciting

[Drishmung]

Read the article. It supports web mail---and having used MyRealBox I can say it's quite good. But, it also supports POP3, IMAP, LDAP and webcal.

So, doesn't this now start to sound more like a free Exchange Server replacement?