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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."
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.
"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:(
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.
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.
So, doesn't this now start to sound more like a free Exchange Server replacement?
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
.. 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
Do tell, why don't you like our ChewbaccaMail product?
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
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
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.
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.
That statement implies you find something drastically wrong with Squirrelmail. Care to let us in on it, or shall we just chalk this up to unsubstantiated FUD?
I use the Squirrel and find very few issues with it. A couple of people at my company have gone so far as to give up standalone mail clients completely, and just use Squirrelmail, and they have no complaints with it.
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!