Novell Dumps the Hula Project

asv108 writes, "On the Hula general mailing list today, it was announced that Novell is no longer providing full-time developers to Hula. While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange. The Hula project was announced in February 2005 with much fanfare."

Comments

No full time developers

[mnmn]

So then are they providing twice as many part-time developers?

Come to think of it, is there such a thing as part-time developers?

Re:No full time developers

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't anyone see this as a good thing???

if novell takes developers off this project they can't pollute the code with ms IP

my hope is they saw this possibility and decided to move people off the project before they really did some damage

salt/wound?

[Russ Nelson]

Why do I detect the feeling of salt poured into an open wound?

Re:salt/wound?

[penguinrenegade]

Looks like Microsoft money helps ward off competing developers as well. Novell sold out - plain and simple.

Novell could have gotten large cash infusions, but instead they let Microsoft intimidate them. This is just plain wrong.

It's pretty obvious what happened from the timing of the event. I'm certain we'll see more of this in the future.

Apparently it was easier for Microsoft to buy off Novell than to fund SCO.

Re:salt/wound?

[leonmergen]

It's pretty obvious what happened from the timing of the event.

Explain to me then, why is it so obvious and not just some random conspiracy theory ?

Re:salt/wound?

[foobsr]

Just to say that I follow your arguments (as there seem to be only few around who get the picture).

CC.

Re:salt/wound?

[drDugan]

to everyone: it's about connections, stupid. connections (communication) between people is the most important thing we do, and it is why the Internet is important.

Exchange is the MS communications gateway, allowing people to connect on MS the proprietary platform with the single most popular online communication tool.

An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft.

Now, only days after a deal between MS and Novell, the open source project to build an exchange alternative is hurt by Novell removing support.

No theories needed here, just look at the facts.

Re:salt/wound?

[Quantam]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Re:salt/wound?

[onescomplement]

I think it's Microsoft looking at the Hula code and going to Novell and saying "well, we kinda looked at this and did you notice this copyright infringement here and trademark infringement here, not to mention likely patent problems..." (dull thud of Exchange-related patents hits table.) ...and oh by the way, to work nicely together we need to show you our extended roadmap for Exchange and .NET (dull thud of NDAs hits table) and particularly your engineers to ensure we work well together. Did we mention we have free soft drinks on our campus?

At least, this will serve as a case study, as does SCO. Too bad it has to be Novell. I still uncover Novell Netware networks chundering away, no backups, nobody left who remembers anything about it. It's The Server and accorded near-holy status. One, last year, still hooked up with coax. They'd violated every ethernet topology rule and it was still working.

Re:salt/wound?

[BlakeReid]

>An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft. This comment was so insightful it motivated me to create a Slashdot account just to say so.

Re:salt/wound?

[bl8n8r]

The internet was built on standards. Open standards at that. If you do not have open standards, then all you have is a closed system that allows for no alternatives. When you have no alternatives, you are locked into a system that dictates everything you do, whether it is broken or not, whether you like it or not. Right now, there are alternatives to Windows, but one day there may not be. Attitudes similar to the above will determine whether you have a choice tomorrow. choose wisely and carefully.

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

I really highly suggest people look at Zimbra. It has 4+million (IIRC) installed mailboxes, is built on top of FOSS (notably Postfix, DSPAM, Spamassassin and Amavis for the mail delivery, and AJAX + Javascript for the web front end). The development proccess is not as transparent as it should be, but bugzilla, subversion and the forums provide more then enough information to get going.

And yes, this the product that needs to be made for Linux to continue it's dominance in the internet world, and give it a strong entry into the intranet world.

Re:salt/wound?

[marcello_dl]

It's pretty obvious what happened from the timing of the event.

Explain to me then, why is it so obvious and not just some random conspiracy theory ?

I'm no statistical expert, but call event A "Novell pwned by M$", call event B "Novell pulls devs from a project which is a direct competitor of M$ stuff". Now, armed with patience and google, calculate the probability of those events in meaningful time intervals (3 months?). Now calculate the compound probability of A and B in the same period. Very unlikely huh? A preceding B is half of it. Does it open your mind?

Your random conspiracy theory is called "cause and effect" :)

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

I was very excited about Hula when it was first announced. I quickly became less enthusastic until I discovered Zimbra, which I have been using since Beta 1 days (it's not version 4.5RC1).

As far as the microsoft angle goes, I don't think it is nearly as open and shut as that. Hula had a variety of problems that were difficult to overcome. Almost all of those problems are centered around the underly platform.

• There is always a question of building on top of the existing stack, or replacing the stack. Hula choose to replace the stack rather then build on top of industry standards
• Hula's C++ mail server duplicates sendmail and postfix. That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail and postfix and replace it with buggy and possibly insecure mail. That's a problem.
• That stack also had a proprietary web server. You loose all the work in apache and tomcat.
• Your new code in on python? Look I know that Python is a pretty piece of work, but it is not something that clients are going to get excited about supporting. Open source means you eat your own dogfood, and very few companies are willing to find python experts to support their mail platform.
  

Anyone who thinks that Hula had any kind of momentum at all before this announcement is ignoring the fundamental architectural problems that killed the project months and months ago. Something may emerge from the ashes. Zimbra has proven it can be done, but it will have to be a firefox to this convoluted and bloated Mozilla.

Re:salt/wound?

[alienw]

You've never used Exchange, have you? Exchange is more like email, calendar, mailing lists, newsgroups, project planning, address book, and collaboration software integrated into one fairly solid package. It's an excellent product, and there is nothing out there that even comes close to being able to replace it.

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

This is absolutely correct. I have seen more UNIX/Linux shops closed because of the need for integrated mail, documents and calenders then for any other reason. First the execs demand mail, then calender, then wonder why they are paying for both Windows and Linux support... then Linux support goes bye bye, and the microsoft lock in factor hits.

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

Guess I missed that in my MCSE track ;-) I could have sworn that my design test had something to do with it... I guess all the thousands of users at Denver hospitals that run outlook that talk to a exchange server that I setup don't really use any of the features.. In fact the sendmail choke mail boxes that talk to active directory before the exchange cluster? Those don't work either.

If you want to make a point, don't do it by making stupid assumptions. And I highly suggest you try out Zimbra. You might just get a bit of a surprise.

Re:salt/wound?

[trawg]

An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft.

I agree wholeheartedly. Our office of around 20 people uses almost exclusively open source applications (though we still run on Windows as games support for us is a must as it is our industry). I recently had to bite the bullet and install Outlook because I desperately need it's calendar functions, both because the open source alternatives just aren't as feature complete and because our clients (and every frickin' one else in the world) uses it.

I have high hopes for Sunbird, the Mozilla project, but development on it is way too slow at the moment.

Re:salt/wound?

[mjm1231]

I recently completed an conversion from Novell's GroupWise (6.0, released in what, 2000?) to Exchange (2003 SP1) for our small network (300 clients). Granted, we don't use all the features of Exchange, nor do we have very many power users, but we lost far more features than we gained, and there are several features which worked smoothly and easily in GroupWise which are clunky or just don't work or don't exist in Exchange/Outlook. Also, the GroupWise server was rebooted about 5 times in as many years, while the Exchange server is rebooted pretty much weekly.

Most of the users love it though, because it looks purtier.

Re:salt/wound?

[CaptainTux]

Personally, I think that Google Applications is going to help change that though. Email, calandaring, and document sharing all branded with your domain or company name.

Re:salt/wound?

[Auntie Virus]

Novell sold out - plain and simple.

Damn. I knew the day was coming, but looks like it's time to get the red N tatoo removed from my ass....

Re:salt/wound?

[blincoln]

the Exchange server is rebooted pretty much weekly.

Sounds like something out of the ordinary is causing problems.

We have 10+ dedicated Exchange servers that handle mailboxes for many thousands of users, and the only time they've crashed regularly was when a third-party backup utility caused some kind of system lockup.

Re:salt/wound?

[ralphdaugherty]

An open source alternative to Exchange is the single most important project the open source community could develop to allow IT managers to migrate away from Microsoft.

      "alternative to Exchange" is not quite the right way open source developers should be looking at this. It's about several fundamental technologies that are core to a complete open source stack. There's probably nothing more important to groups using computers than integrated connections.

      It's really about having your own vision rather than an alternative to Microsoft's vision.

  rd

Re:salt/wound?

[Anonymous Coward]

that doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

I know for a fact A and B are unrelated - I work for Novell and wanted to get on the Hula project. It's been dead for months, even before the MS/Novell deal.

Re:salt/wound?

[Nutria]

We have 10+ dedicated Exchange servers that handle mailboxes for many thousands of users

That's probably why your systems don't crash often. 4000 users served by 12 dedicated Exchange servers is 333.33 users/server. That's PATHETIC!!!!! No wonder it never crashes.

A turn of the century Unix/Linux server (server means: fast SCSI disks) can handle thousands of users with ease.

Re:salt/wound?

[Nutria]

It's been dead for months, even before the MS/Novell deal.

MS & Novell have been talking for months.

Re:salt/wound?

[Criminally Insane Ro]

It had pluggable support for other MTA's:
http://hula-project.org/General_FAQ#Can_I_use_Hula _with_an_existing_MTA.3F
http://hula-project.org/Configuring_Hula_To_CoExis t#How_to_configure_Hula_to_use_an_existing_Postfix _MTA_and_use_Hula_for_mail_and_calendaring

Zimbra is NICE, but Hula could have provided ISP's a way of giving their customers a gmail-like experience,
since it aimed for carrier-grade email.

to quote the faq:

Hula was designed to be highly scalable, to compartmentalize multiple organizations on a single machine, and to allow multi-layer role-based administration for a carrier, and organization, and a user.

You might want to check out the list of hosting companies and ISPs who are using NetMail today in exactly that way.

If you don't know what any of this means, don't worry about it. Just know that once Hula has taken over the world ;), your cell phone provider will be using Hula to integrate your email and voicemail and to keep your addressbook for you even when you switch cell phones.

Hula had and still does have so much potential. Think of it as gmail for your domain. It could be better than POP4: http://www.pop4.org/

Re:salt/wound?

[plazman30]

That would make sense if Novell didn't already make this product called GroupWise, which consistently spanks Microsoft in the groupware category of every major PC magazine's awards.

GroupWise is an awesome product, whose collaboration features far surpass those of Outlook/Exchange. Hula was a good idea, but I think Novell would be better of simply open sourcing GroupWise.

I have used Domino/Notes 6.5.5, Outlook/Exchange 2003 and GroupWise 6.5, and of the three, I prefer GroupWise.

Andy

Re:salt/wound?

[mnmn]

This withdrawal really affects me.

At the last job, Lotus Domino and the ERP system were the only two apps that we needed which only ran on windows. It was the only thing holding us back from a 100% opensource company.

Hula when it was opensourced was very interesting. Now its gone and the need for a collaboration software is just greater. I only wish IBM opensources or at least releases a Linux version of their Lotus Notes binaries (I know domino runs on Linux, iNotes and know about the rare demo versions. They dont cut it).

Linux is almost there. There are some niche applications like collaboration that are holding it back, and Hula was a good hope.

Re:salt/wound?

[plazman30]

It's a shame you didn't move to 6.5. It's purtier than 6.0!

I was on a project for a client once that moved from GroupWise 6.5 to Exchange/Outlook 2003. My job was to walk around the floor and answer people's questions. Every single question involved things user couldn't do any more:

1. Why can't I get properties on my sent items and see if someone read a message without getting a return receipt?
2. Why can't I take a category in my personal address book and share it out?
3. Why can't I share out a folder easily?
4. Where's my document library?

GroupWise really is Exchange+Sharepoint. It's a damn good product.

Re:salt/wound?

[hb253]

We are/were a mostly GroupWise shop until the end of this year. The coporate parent dictated a move to Notes. I cannot believe how absolutely awful Notes is on so many levels. It's painful.

Re:salt/wound?

[crayz]

Apple looks ready to make a serious pushback against Exchange. I hope they take it all the way

Re:salt/wound?

[pallmall1]

... I work for Novell ...

No wonder you post anonymously.

Re:salt/wound?

[mabhatter654]

but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have that are the killer to migrating away from it. All the office apps, sharepoint, Active directory, all expect to tie back to an Exchange server and simply have no other way to use the "must have" collaboration tools without it. That's the deviousness of Microsoft.. all sorts of other apps that use MS development tools like .Net expect to tie to MS tools. Many third party apps use that "one piece" you've got no control over when it MUST run a special machine custom for your industry.

I'm not knocking the OSS solution, not at all, but the "Exchange" problem isn't JUST an email server.. it's all the third party stuff all over the company that just assumes you've got Microsoft... In many cases you've got no way (profitable) to chase down all those loose ends... and when you finally DO, some middle manager pulls in ANOTHER must have app you have to fight over.

What's needed is more SOLUTIONS and not just pieces. The modularity of OSS is a strength and a weakness. The strength is in rapid integration of modules.. the weakness is the problem that every geek expects THEIR favorite module to work with every other module... we need to start thinking in STACKS of features rather than individual apps. The issue for geeks is that their favorite apps may not end up in the same feature "stack"... in order to round out the feature set easily without duplication. I think Google building it's own apps helps break the "must have MS" syndrome.. but Google's stuff is still their own.. and much doesn't translate to something that's feature COMPLETE in OSS right now. That's the next step for Linux distros.... to offer turnkey solutions, and not just parts. Ubuntu is on the right track, but they're not nearly ambitious enough at promoting STACKS of functions "ready to go"... but the users in the forums are definately on the right track... witness Automatix. Now do that for domain/email/groupware setup and you'll have something interesting for business.

Re:salt/wound?

[larry bagina]

That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail

So what's the downside?

Re:salt/wound?

[TooMuchToDo]

Correlation does not imply causation.

Re:salt/wound?

[NotZed]

HULA is C, not C++. It is also built ontop of standards. IMAP, SMTP, etc. They are the industry standards. Sendmail is not, it is just an, unfortunately, still popular implementation of some standards. Tomcat? Wtf has a java j2ee container got to do with a web server? Not going to be much use for a C project ... A web server is nothing particularly special anyway, particularly when you're serving fully dynamic content. The architecture wasn't particularly well documented, but it was simple, about as simple as it can get. It was a lean simple architecture written in straight C, it isn't bloated. The web frontend isn't 'the architecture' either, its just one module.

Your arguments are pretty dumb - why not just say it was too immature for you or you didn't like it, and leave it at that, rather than making stuff up which doesn't match reality.

Re:salt/wound?

[sanyam_y]

How do I lose "loose" ? :)

Re:salt/wound?

[10Ghz]

You've never used Exchange, have you? Exchange is more like email, calendar, mailing lists, newsgroups, project planning, address book, and collaboration software integrated into one fairly solid package. It's an excellent product, and there is nothing out there that even comes close to being able to replace it.
  Lotus Notes/Domino comes to mind. In fact, we are using Notes, and from our standpoint, Exchange doesn't even come close to replacing Notes.

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

• HULA is C, not C++. It is also built ontop of standards. IMAP, SMTP, etc. I am not talking about standards, I am talking about the open source stack. Use or migrate to what's already proven and out there with mind share as opposed to pushing your own incompatible LDAP system (never integrated AFAIK with other LDAP systems - certainly not with Active Directory) as opposed to continuing a system with a severe case of NIH.
  
• Tomcat? Wtf has a java j2ee container got to do with a web server? You seem to be confused. Tomcat is a servlet/jsf container, not just (or even primarily) a J2EE container. Look at JBOSS for that. Tomcat is a primary way to serve JSF files, which puts it squarely in the dynamic web serving category. Hula had (last I looked, which was about 3 months ago) it's own web server for quite a while.
  
• Sendmail is not, it is just an, unfortunately, still popular implementation of some standards -- Sendmail has the advantage of being the one true way to send SMTP email for a very long time. Postfix, Q-Mail and others have stepped into that role. The bottom line still is that I don't see anyone here making any kind of argument that somehow Hula's mail stack was a industry leader or as well tested as any of thoose aforementioned packages.
  
• A web server is nothing particularly special anyway, particularly when you're serving fully dynamic content. So adding another web server for system admins to learn how to admin on top of what they already do is justified? Requiring all Hula developers to learn a different stack is not a good path for adoption of the technology.
  
• The architecture wasn't particularly well documented, but it was simple, about as simple as it can get. But it was different. That's what people fail to understand. Requiring developers and administrators to learn completely new functionality that could just as easily be based off of other much more widely accepted open technologies is a sure way to loose developer interest. Is SMTP + Backing Store + LDAP + Web front end that hard to understand? Yes, if ever piece of it is proprietary, no if it's Postfix + MySQL + OpenLDAP + Tomcat/Apache.
  

Why not just say it was too immature for you or you didn't like it, and leave it at that.


Your right. I didn't like Hula once I got past the "gee-whiz" factor and actually started looking at code. And a year later, the reasons I didn't like the hula code still hold. Here is the rub, as a IT consultant (who has installed several 1000+ user email solutions on everything from Exchange to Sendmail + LDAP) I am out there promoting the daylight out of solutions that are not Hula. As a open source contributor I write code for solutions not Hula. And sadly, I still move people from Linux to Windows because their linux solution can't compete with Exchange.

Re:salt/wound?

[obdulio]

Lotus Notes?

Re:salt/wound?

[Nat Friedman]

That conspiracy theory, while entertaining, is just totally untrue.

The Hula team decided not to go forward with the project because the project wasn't working. It had been nearly two years since we launched Hula and during that time a lot of other people entered the space (Zimbra, Google Calendar, etc) and implemented many of the innovative things that we had planned to do with Hula. This took some of the wind out of our sails, and we had some execution problems too; I don't know if you've noticed, but the project has essentially gone two years without a release, and if you've ever done any significant software development before, you know that's not a sign of a healthy project.

Now, there is some great work in Hula and we sincerely hope that some of it will be useful to the community. The AJAX-based dragonfly web interface for mail and calendar is gorgeous and open source and could be turned into a nice replacement for SquirrelMail or the other web mail/calendar interfaces. The Hula store and the former NetMail agent code are also both open source and other companies are using them now as well.

The guys who worked on this stuff (Jacob Berkman, Peter Teichman, Dave Camp, Cyrus Dolph, Rodney Price, and others) are extremely bright guys, did fabulous work, and really enjoyed the project -- but unfortunately it's one of those things that didn't work out the way everyone hoped. So it goes.

Novell customers of NetMail and GroupWise and other products can rest assured that they are unaffected and will be supported and carried forward -- I'm sure Novell will have things to say about that, so stay tuned.

Re:salt/wound?

[ebassi]

post hoc ergo propter hoc - before that therefore because of that. sorry, but this seldom is the truth. also what is more likely: that microsoft wanted to crush a still pre-release quality product or that novell shifted money (a resource not overabundant for them, these days) and developers from a perceivedly failing project (which is replicating what already exists in various forms)?

Re:salt/wound?

[ickoonite]

English lesson:

We have 10+ dedicated Exchange servers that handle mailboxes for many thousands of users.

We have 10+ dedicated Exchange servers that each handle mailboxes for many thousands of users.

:|

Re:salt/wound?

[Hathor's Dad]

>but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have

As a MD of a ntaional recruitment firm I can say that most people skills tested cannot use many (MOST!) of the features in MS apps. MS Server Admis are no different. No one has to have this stuff - this is fluff around any of the core apps - by core we mean communicate (email client / server), shared diary system, shared files.

Now with firefox, thunderbird, apache, php, mysql, samba, rsync, ssh, nfs - isn't this all trivial? It is in my business.

Oh and users perfer supported programs - ie: they can go and ask "Bob" if their screen can have a new menu / button / whatever and the next day Bob knocks out the code and the innovation is put into practice.

Re:salt/wound?

[0racle]

Unless you use and do nothing but the most simplest of things where a pad of paper and a pen would be a good replacement, no it is not simple or trivial.

Re:salt/wound?

[UKRevenant]

People have already mentioned Notes, so I wont bother with any more on that one.

I have to admit that exchange is probably one of the best email servers out there, it is hard to believe that this is a microsoft product. That said it is full of the usual short sighted design limits that are finally going away. The biggest problem is its complexity. I know that it will never be the easiest product to configure, but there are so many options that can be set in multiple locations that it is not clear which one has precidence and without checking all of the locations you cannot be sure you have all of the settings correct. Once configured and running, exchange is pretty robust and predictable.

As for alternatives, Scalix (http://www.scalix.com/) is very good. Then it should be it has HP OpenMail as a background. The scalix web interface is excellent and whilst it is not the easiest product to configure for smaller environments it is not a big problem and it has great performance and reliability. I am sure that Scalix will continue to grow as a serious contender to Exchange. Its a shame that Samsung never made the same go of it as Scalix are doing as the samsung name would probably have helped open doors.

Re:salt/wound?

[plazman30]

I use Notes every day at work now. It's an OK product, but GroupWise is simply much better. Andy

Re:salt/wound?

[sams67]

Novell, Novell, now that rings a bell, I think they did open source 'til they started to smell.

Re:salt/wound?

[mortonda]

Now, there is some great work in Hula and we sincerely hope that some of it will be useful to the community.

Do you think the comunity is going to touch this code after Novell's deal with MS?

Re:salt/wound?

[Doctor Memory]

but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have that are the killer to migrating away from it.Yep. If you don't have a BlackBerry conduit, you're not going to get much buy-in from companies with more than a couple hundred employees.

Re:salt/wound?

[octopus72]

It shouldn't be hard to implement that level of integration anymore. Samba recent work focused on interoperability for AD/MS-Kerberos and recent samba3 versions (i.e. pam&nss winbind plugin) allow Linux machines to seamlessly integrate with AD accounts.

But Samba4 really will really come with their own AD server implementation (based on modified Heimdal and OpenLDAP). If FOSS Exchange clones and e-mail clients include interoperability with help of Samba research (depending of course on samba license compatibility) it will be a huge anti-lock-in hit against MS and their collaborative suite.

Re:salt/wound?

[horza]

A bit late to comment maybe, but I'm just amazed nobody else has! And how on earth did it get +5 insightful?? Let's look at the supposed problems:

There is always a question of building on top of the existing stack, or replacing the stack. Hula choose to replace the stack rather then build on top of industry standards

Huh? Hula implements SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP amongst other very well established industry standards. How is that not building on industry standards? Your definition of a 'stack' being a mish-mash or mediocre and difficult to configure applications is a bit odd.

Hula's C++ mail server duplicates sendmail and postfix. That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail and postfix and replace it with buggy and possibly insecure mail. That's a problem.

This deserves Flamebait all on its own. Sendmail has a history of being the buggiest and most insecure software of all time. Check out the history of security advisories. Replacing it with buggy and possibly insecure mail? I heard Novell's Netmail had a reasonably good reputation. As for the laughable statement "duplicates sendmail and postfix"... wtf? Every server app that implements the SMTP protocol is duplicating sendmail and postfix? Nonsense. Different clients have different needs and complexities of an SMTP server.

That stack also had a proprietary web server. You loose all the work in apache and tomcat.

So you want to install apache and tomcat just to serve up some webmail? Isn't that extreme overkill? You can use Hula for webmail and apache for web on the same machine... each one serving its purpose and appropriately isolated from each other.

Anyone who thinks that Hula had any kind of momentum at all before this announcement is ignoring the fundamental architectural problems that killed the project months and months ago.

I am guessing you aren't particularly well qualified to talk about fundamental architectural problems. Or maybe I am wrong, in which case please enlighten me?

Phillip.

Re:salt/wound?

[tenchiken]

Huh? Hula implements SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP amongst other very well established industry standards. How is that not building on industry standards? Your definition of a 'stack' being a mish-mash or mediocre and difficult to configure applications is a bit odd.


As I made clear on another post, I am talking about the software stack, not the standards. In other words,instead of Apache, DSPAM, MySQL ClamAV,Postfix, OpenLDAP, and Tomcat or Php, it has it's own web server, It's own (incompatible) LDAP database, it's own dynamic web technology, it's own proprietary database, it's own spam functionality, it's own anti-virus technology, and it's own SMTP and IMAP server.

Hula built on top of the industry standard, but they sure didn't build on top of the industry stack. If nothing else go look at some of the discussions since the announcement. They are talking about dragonfly off from the hula code, and using that on top of other open source software. That is what they should have done in the first place a year ago.


This deserves Flamebait all on its own. Sendmail has a history of being the buggiest and most insecure software of all time. Check out the history of security advisories. Replacing it with buggy and possibly insecure mail? I heard Novell's Netmail had a reasonably good reputation. As for the laughable statement "duplicates sendmail and postfix"... wtf? Every server app that implements the SMTP protocol is duplicating sendmail and postfix? Nonsense. Different clients have different needs and complexities of an SMTP server.

Maybe part of the problem with sendmail is that email is complex in the first place? Attack sendmail, but what about postfix? Not using existing proven systems is a sure way to set oneself up for the exact same type of problems as both of those packages encountered by re-investing the wheel.

  As far as different needs, and different complexities, can you really defend the statement that somehow the needs and requirements for Postfix and Hula are so different as the justify the thousands of lines of duplicated effort?


So you want to install apache and tomcat just to serve up some webmail? Isn't that extreme overkill? You can use Hula for webmail and apache for web on the same machine... each one serving its purpose and appropriately isolated from each other.


It might be overkill, but then again, you might need that functionality in the future anyways. For example, last I saw the Hula guys were trying to rewrite the web server to have pretty urls, support AJAX and do renaming. Apache already has all of those things.


I am guessing you aren't particularly well qualified to talk about fundamental architectural problems.


I am getting really tired of these attacks on my qualifications from people who don't bother to read what I wrote in the first place, and have a knee jerk reaction that because I differ with their point of view, I must not be qualified.

Here is a hint. Go look at the top selling Unix administration handbook. I wrote part of it, and am in the acknowledgments. You can also try to tell my customers that I didn't know what I was doing when I built intranet, internet and email systems over the last 10 years. For the record, that includes a fair number of ISPs, The US Navy, and several fortune 100 companies.

Re:salt/wound?

[Abreu]

Well, YMMV, but everybody at my office makes HEAVY use of the shared calendaring feature.

Re:salt/wound?

[Allador]

" ... we lost far more features than we gained, and there are several features which worked smoothly and easily in GroupWise which are clunky or just don't work or don't exist in Exchange/Outlook."

Can you give some specific examples? For those of us who dont have any experience with GroupWise in production, that would be handy to know. Personally, I've never even heard of/encountered a company that uses GroupWise, so I have about zero knowledge.

" ... the Exchange server is rebooted pretty much weekly."

Why? At most, it should be once per month on the monthly Super Tuesday (ie, patch day), and only then if the patches require a full server reboot, rather than just server restarts.

Re:salt/wound?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Our facility has been a Linux shop since before Linux was cool.

We just dropped in an Exchange server to handle calendaring. And that was after spending years writing our own web calendar from scratch.

The problem is, all of the Open sources solutions are f'ing chimeras of 9 or 10 different projects, and it's impossible to make them consistant. Zimbra was an absolute mess. I shudder when I think about the number of pipes. bypasses, hash tables, and whatnot go into our Linux mail system.

I did get one concession. Exchange is only being used as a calendar. I managed to persuasively argue that an exchange box tied into the outside world is a bomb waiting to go off. People have 2 windows open, Thunderbird and Exchange. As far as they know, Exchange is a calendar and only a calendar. Fortunately most of upper management has been here long enough to remember the bad old days of computing when we would be up, and the likes of Ford and Citibank would be down because of the Virus of the week.

I have hope for the new collaboration suite Apple is putting together for Leopard. Though if I could be given a million dollars and a mission, I would want to sit down and write the difinitive email and collaboration system.

The worst part is I have most of the pieces lying around in various states of disrepair from my own project. Advantage is it's all written on one programming language with one development framework.

Re:salt/wound?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

And a good number of have tried this an know first hand.

Re:salt/wound?

[turbidostato]

"I have to admit that exchange is probably one of the best email servers out there"

What the f*???

I can admit it's a good integration/egroupwaring tool (though most of it becomes from the almost monopoly Ms Office detents); I could even admit it has some good MDA features, but... email server!!!??? It's almost pure shit!

It's buggy, overloaded and fragile, and if nowadays talks SMTP the way it should be it's only because it came late to the field (they tried to bastardize SMTP too, but luckily enough there already were some free source mates there to stop it).

Just as a proof: noone on his mind leaves an Exchange server open to the Internet (and I mean *only* the TCP port 25). Everybody will use a front end MTA (a *real* one, I mean, be it Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, Qmail... whatever); even if you are really an MS shop, you will have a "choke server", a "front end gateway" or whatever they call it these days.

"Once configured and running, exchange is pretty robust and predictable."

Yeah: you can predict with sureness it will bog down as soon as next spam attack reaches to it.

Re:salt/wound?

[praseodym]

Actually, Google has exactly the same "syndrome", it's just another case of it. If you look at the Google Calendar, it's only useful if you use Gmail for mail. Their Photo service is only useful with Picasa to manage your photos. Google Talk only works together with a Gmail address. And so on.

Coincidence? I think not

[dkleinsc]

Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with that decision?

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[EllynGeek]

Nah, it's a completely independent decision having nothing to do with their new Redmond overlords.

How weird, my nose is growing.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[mordors9]

Surely you aren't suggesting that there were some other "understandings" the MS and Novell came to during their recent business agreement that weren't announced, are you? That would almost be suggesting that the two companies aren't being completely above board in their business dealing...

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[Marc_Hawke]

Whether MS had anything to do with that or not...you've got to admit that it makes LOVELY, Grade A conpsiracy fodder. It's the kind of thing where the timing couldn't have been worse.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[iamnafets]

If not, their timing was impeccable. Keeping those developers on for another month sure wouldn't have hurt the PR...

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[TheViewFromTheGround]

I strongly doubt the MS brouhaha has much to do with this. Novell is a company in very serious trouble, and the MS agreement as well as this announcement are the fruit of the same poisoned tree.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your tinfoil hat off.

Hula was a piece of software that deserved to die. It did the things that Exchange does but didn't interoperate with Exchange. And since not many people in the Linux/Unix world are interested in running a mail server like Exchange/Hula that is a jack of all trades, master of none, people didn't really use Hula. So Novell was pouring all the time and money into a project that they thought everyone wanted, but no one really did.

Honestly, have you heard of anyone actually using Hula? I certainly haven't. I'm sure the Novell sales reps made a few sales based on Hula, but really anyone with a clue was running Sendmail, Postfix, or whatever plain Jane email server your prefer, and the few people who really did want an Exchange like solution just ran something like Zimbra that does the same thing but runs Postfix underneath.

If dumping Hula means that Novell will spend money on things that are actually useful to the open source community then this is great news. Because I'm sure no one is really sorry to see Hula go.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, but Dave Camp, the project leader left Novell recently, if that's of any consequence..

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[Anonymous Coward]

There's something to be learned here, I think. If MS subverted Novell to (among other things) kill the hula project, It means MS thinks hula could have provided real competition to MS exchange. That makes it important to continue the hula project elsewhere, if possible.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[drinkypoo]

I tried out Hula but it was missing major functionality at the time (few months ago) and wasn't all that stable. But the real stumbling block was the virtually nonexistent documentation, which was blatantly incorrect in many places. Well, that and the difficulty of even coming up with a working system.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[nine-times]

Yes, because Microsoft was seriously on the verge of having Hula overtake Exchange.

Yes, that's sarcasm.

I liked Hula, or at least the idea of it, but there are quite a few of these sorts of applications around, I don't find any of them quite satisfying, and I doubt Hula has much of that market anyway. Besides, it's FOSS. Novel can't kill it if it wants to, so long as there are programmers willing to work on it.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[shades66]

>Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with that decision?

NO... never... They wouldn't do a thing like that...

Anyway next weeks update to SLES10 will include the following features
a) OpenOffice has been updated to load/save Word documents by default and Macros will run by default.
b) Firefox has been updated to use MSN as it's homepage and default search engine
c) Evolution has been patched to try and execute all email attachments when you view an email.
d) All the above programs now need to be run as root

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[swerk]

Short answer:
No, believe it or not, Microsoft wasn't in on this.

Longer answer:
I work at Novell, and for about a year, I was on Hula. I loved it. I still run it on my home server, and it still bothers me that I didn't get to finish and polish the bits I was hacking on. An insufficient degree of planning and management led to the magic "1.0" getting pushed farther out and being less clearly defined. Inside Novell culture (and elsewhere, I would think), that's a bad sign. Other projects were in the spotlight, some Ximian modus operandi kept a lot of Hula's exciting stuff secret, and a few months back, the already-thin team was cut back dramatically. At the same time, its release deadline was moved up, and Hula was still without what I'd call a manager. The writing was on the wall well before the Microsoft deal came around.

I made the mistake of getting pretty emotionally attached to Hula, so this has all been pretty rough for me to watch. I worked weekends and wee hours on that code, and I'd do it again. I can't blame anyone for using this news as fuel for the fire and/or shouting "Novell just doesn't get it", and I can't blame anyone for being highly suspicious given the recent Microsoft deal (I'm still not sure how I feel about that, by the way). But I can say, and you can take with as much salt you want: No, this was the result, a long time coming, of numerous mistakes, and of other decisions that truly didn't seem like mistakes at the time. As much as I love to blame Microsoft for stuff, the facts say otherwise in this case.

Its death as a Novell-sponsored project is unfortunate, but Hula's not dead - it's grown a small community and a bunch of us still have commit access. Read the mailing list message, take a breather, and if you still feel like being pissed off at Novell or Microsoft, fine. I tried. But at least check out Hula. It still has a ton of promise and is surprisingly useful today.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[deadhammer]

I still run it on my home server, and it still bothers me that I didn't get to finish and polish the bits I was hacking on.

Why not? It's not like Novel owned Hula. Taking the source code home with you is perfectly alright with an open source project. If you want to, you can finish up the remainder of the code on your own. That's what open source is all about! Then, tell us how you did it. The community, and the team that takes up Hula after Novel has unceremoniously dropped it, will thank you.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[tenchiken]

Once again, go take a look at Zimbra. There was a article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago that was front page even that covered the traction Zimbra is getting. It even mentioned that Microsoft and specifically Bill G knew about Zimbra, and were starting to have customers bring it up. That's the kind of product the open source world needs in this space.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[rainman_bc]

Novell is a company in very serious trouble

Doesn't Novell claim to have the rights to Unix, insofar as the SCO lawsuit was concerned?

That's a pretty valuable patent, in terms of dollars.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[marcello_dl]

Hula wasn't yet able to compare to exchange, so what? Most succesful projects aren't able to compete with estabilished ones, until they're mature enough, and how can you prove this one would have been a failure? Also, Windows still can't compare to MacOS, yet it was succesful enough, I'd say.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[schwaang]

No, this was the result, a long time coming, of numerous mistakes, and of other decisions that truly didn't seem like mistakes at the time.

Wait, are you talking about Hula or the Microsoft deal??

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[tenchiken]

Hula wasn't able to do anything without a huge amount of duct-tape and bailing wire. Even if you did manage by some mircle to get it working, replacing all of the sendmail, httpd and ldap servers, you could not integrate with ActiveDirectory, could not add functionality to the stack, had a web interface that was just plain ugly (dragonfly is much better) and could not easily integrate with most of the anti spam systems out there.

More to the point, they had a core crew that looked at JWZ, declared him God, read his statements, proclaimed them good, and then immediately replayed every single mistake that Mozilla ever made.

Hula needed to be simple, clean and functional. Even know a year later, it is none of those things.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[wkitchen]

The week after that: Millions of users are switching from Windows, MS Office, IE, and Outlook to SUSE, OO, FireFox, and Evolution now that the last barrier to FOSS adoption has fallen: familiarity.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[askegg]

Glad to hear from someone who was actually developing the product.

I implemented Netmail for a reasonably large non profit organisation here in Australia with terrific results. Since Netmail integrated so tightly with eDirectory (which we used to keep the membership information) it was a breeze giving everyone an email address with wemail, forwarding, spam protection, calendaring, etc. One of the best features was its recognition of eDirectory groups (even dynamic ones) which we used as the basis for email lists with great effect (up to the minute accurate based on user defined attributes).

When Novell first announced Hula I was concerned what this might mean for the existing Netmail installations (here are many who are *much* larger than us). Admittedly, I have not kept a close eye on the developments as I have moved on to other projects, but is seems my initial fears were confirmed. I hope the small development community around Hula continues and releases great stuff.

BTW - IMHO, Hula was never really meant to be an Exchange killer. As a kid it was trained to do different things and was never really suited to taking on the big boy. Novell has Groupwise against Exchange, but that is a whole other subject...

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[mnmn]

You do not work in a significantly sized company do you?

I've used Exchange and Lotus Domino. I can tell you its an absolute NEED. Managers themselves stop functioning when you take collaboration offline, and I'm not just talking about email.

I have a $20,000 server I'm itching to switch to ANYTHING on Linux/BSD/Opensolaris if I get the right collaboration software with a significant company backing it up with support.

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[mha]

What kind of idiots get moderator rights at Slashdot? How can a single (pretty stupid) line of text which does not say ANYTHING useful get all those points AND be tagged "insightful"? What kind of "insights" does someone have who doesn't actually say anything??? (Not that I'm saying anything useful right now, but this time I *DO* have to vent some anger at hearing the same BS again and again and again and... and then some people even mod this up!)

Re:Coincidence? I think not

[crucini]

What about Oracle Mail? Claims to be a better Exchange.

Hm, I wonder why?

[RagingFuryBlack]

Wow, I wonder how much pressure MS exerted to get Novell to pull developers off of this?

Re:Hm, I wonder why?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Microsoft, Apple, Quicktime, "Knife the baby". Sound familiar?

Re:Hm, I wonder why?

[BigBuckHunter]

Wow, I wonder how much pressure MS exerted to get Novell to pull developers off of this?

We'll never know. Perhaps the answer was in the responses (002085 to 002090) before they wiped them off the server?

BBH

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

An open source project dying a quiet, pathetic death in lieu of things that might actually generate revenue?

NOW I've seen everything.

Re:What?

[rubycodez]

A major distributor of GNU/Linux dying a quiet, pathetic death snuggled up to Microsoft in lieu of being an open source giant? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Re:What?

[burnin1965]

in lieu of things that might actually generate revenue

Yep, and who would have ever imagined you could generate revenue from competitors by removing your development resources from your competitive project. It makes you wonder how far Novell can go with this, they may be able to get by with threats of hiring developers instead wasting capital on labor expenses.

Interesting business model. Pay us cash or we'll hire people to develop a competing product. Wow, I should patent that.

burnin

Re:What?

[RAMMS EIN]

If it dies, it's either not open source, or not any good.

Zimbra?

[tmccann]

Didn't Zimbra beat them to the punch anyway?

Re:Zimbra?

[TheViewFromTheGround]

All of the options, including Zimbra and OpenXchange, have serious problems. Hula looked really nifty and nice, if a bit monolithic. However, it always had a whiff of the vaporware about it and I think the case on that is now closed.

Re:Zimbra?

[pherthyl]

Kolab http://kolab.org/ is another option

Re:Zimbra?

[misleb]

Zimbra is just web based. Believe it or not, people actually LIKE Outlook. If you want an "Exchange Killer" you need to integrate well with Outlook and Evolution. I mean Calendar and all. Not just IMAP/POP.

If I am not mistaken, Hula was aiming to go all the way.

-matthew

Re:Zimbra?

[div_2n]

When is the last time you looked at Zimbra? The latest release is getting good reviews.

Good enough in fact that I'm going to deploy it as our internal mail server of choice very soon.

Out of curiosity, what are the serious problems you allege?

Re:Zimbra?

[tenchiken]

I use both Outlook (for work) and Zimbra (for home). Zimbra's interface is a bit slower getting started (the Zimbra guys need to do some sped work), but other then that it's just as responsive as Outlook, and it has drag and drop, inline spell check, awesome documents support (in beta now) and you can pull it up with any modern browser.

I know I am coming off as a Zimbra troll here, but the amount of wrong information that is floating here is non trivial.

Re:Zimbra?

[TFoo]

Zimbra is not just web based, it supports (open-source edition): POP,IMAP,WebDav as well as the Web Client

The paid-version of Zimbra supports:
      MAPI (Outlook's native interface to Exchange), ActiveSync, and iSync.

Re:Zimbra?

[misleb]

Do you use Outlook for shared calendars too? Or do you just connect to the Zimbra server with IMAP?

-matthew

Re:Zimbra?

[tenchiken]

No. The web interface honest to god is much better then outlook. I use that, and then sometimes export/import .ics files.

Customers left stranded!

[grolschie]

So where will be buy our hula hoops from now? :-(

Competition?

[MongolJohn]

I wonder if there is a non-competition clause in the recent agreement.

Re:Competition?

[stevesliva]

I wonder if there is a non-competition clause in the recent agreement.

Right. In other news, Novell is getting out of the operating system, virtualization, and identity management businesses. In a press release, Novell states, "We got tired of selling actual software that does stuff."

Re:Competition?

[alexhard]

Hey now, don't put them down like that..they don't just make "stuff", their software does "things" too! stuff and things, that's it!

Re:Competition?

[pallmall1]

stuff and things, that's it!--

Since they've teamed up with Microsoft and become Microvell, they now make really cool, exciting, and innovative stuff and things!

Hmmm...

[brouski]

Launch wild conspiracy theories in 3...2...1...

OX

[x3nos]

My understanding is that Open-Xchange is way ahead in development anyway.

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement.

I don't think there's anything illegal about Novell dropping its support for the Hula project, but it's another sign that they've welshed out on their former friends for money. About the best we could do in response would be to continue the project and get it deployed in the enterprise.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Brandybuck]

I don't think there's anything illegal about Novell dropping its support for the Hula project

You don't think?!?! Last time I checked there was no law forcing them to pay for Hula development. If you don't like Novell, just don't use their products. No need to pull a Redhat and imply that they're criminals.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

If you don't like Novell, just don't use their products.

Telling me not to use Novell's products if I don't like them ignores the fact that I'm one of the guys who wrote "their" products. I doubt you can install that system without using my software. And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.

No need to ... imply that they're criminals.

Except that they've just chosen to ally with an authentic convicted anti-monopoly law violator, found so by more than one jurisdiction. And their collusion with that law violator is engineered to reinforce the monopoly.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[everphilski]

Just because your petition drive has stagnated (still under 2100 signatures, I see) doesn't mean you get to troll Slashdot...

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[jrockway]

> Telling me not to use Novell's products if I don't like them ignores the fact that I'm one of the guys who wrote "their" products. I doubt you can install that system without using my software. And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.

That's the thing about writing Free software -- people are Free to do things you don't like with it. Suck it up and realize that 99.9% of the people that use your software appreciate the work you do (and aren't using your software to screw other people) :)

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[radarjd]

Telling me not to use Novell's products if I don't like them ignores the fact that I'm one of the guys who wrote "their" products. I doubt you can install that system without using my software. And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.

Exactly how are they "welsh[ing] on the agreement that comes with [your] software"? Presumably you chose a particular license under which to release said software. Are they violating that license or breaching a contract? If so, sue them. I imagine you know a few people who would support you in that effort.

If it's a less legally substantial reason that you're displeased, then you're not alone in being a person who did work in good faith, but has discovered that good faith only gets you so far.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Otter]

And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.

Sorry, the agreement that comes with your software requires them to pay Hula developers how, exactly?

And as others have pointed out, you're repeatedly tossing around an ethnic slur...

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

people are free to do things you don't like with it

Yes, when I wrote the Open Source Definition, I made sure that it would be OK for you to use Open Source even if the author didn't like your politics. This was because of a license I'd seen from UC Berkeley on the Spice circuit simulation program, which prohibited the police of South Africa from using it. And still did, 10 years after apartheid was over and said police were probably Black.

But this case is different, becuase Novell and Microsoft have created a legal fiction of covenants rather than licenses in order to do what my license prohibits.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

Sorry, the agreement that comes with your software requires them to pay Hula developers how, exactly?

The agreement doesn't require them to do that. That's just walking out on your frends for money. And I suppose you're going to tell me there's nothing bad about that, because it's not breaking the law.

The agreement does, however, require that they not create a tiered environment of patent rights on my software. Which is what they are trying to do.

Is "welsh" an ethnic slur? On people from Wales? Sorry. I didn't know.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[phoenix.bam!]

You're using the word welsh properly and in context.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[TheRealSlimShady]

Let's see - a project which virtually no one uses, which has virtually no market share, and Microsoft saw that as enough of a threat to get it killed off. Somehow I don't think so...I think it more likely that Novell saw that the project had no future and killed it themselves.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[foobsr]

A Jewish man from Wales, I find this comment offensive.

You should sue the creators of English for damages (or the copyright holders, if that matters). Good luck!

CC.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[NickFortune]

Is "welsh" an ethnic slur? On people from Wales? Sorry. I didn't know.

I think it's more of a spelling mistake. In the way you're using word. I'd have spelt it as "welch". But a quick check on Google will show support for both spellings.

Maybe it's one of those UK/US spelling differences. I still wouldn't have thought it a slur

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Otter]

You're using the word welsh properly and in context.

He is. The word is an anti-Welsh slur. The two facts are irrelevant to one another.

As for the legal issue, this guy hit it on the nose.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Big words from an anonymous coward.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[ganhawk]

Why is "put up or shut up" the only option ?

This is his way of gathering supporters without spending millions in court. A lot of people on this site care about the issue and making noise by having a pettition with huge number of supporters is a good thing.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[WilliamSChips]

May I ask what software you've written ever?

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[mrdaveb]

Yeah, and 'welch' is an archaic spelling of 'welsh'. It most likely originated as a slur of some kind. In any case, you don't hear this usage much in Wales

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Sam Ritchie]

Hmm - dictionary.com says 'Origin unknown'. Merriam-Webster says 'Probably from Welsh'. I'm not sure you can unequivocally label this an ethnic slur - at worst, it was one in the distant past.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[schon]

Nice racial slur you've got there

First of all, you need to look up the word racial - it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Second, when used as Mr. Perens did, it doesn't refer to any nationality.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

Written, not played.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[pallmall1]

Are they violating that license or breaching a contract?

Neither Novell or Microsoft has released the exact terms of the agreement. Perhaps there are violations. Regardless, Novell has an obligation to fully disclose the exact terms of the agreement signed to the authors of the software included in their distributions.

Do you have a copy of the document signed by Novell and Microsoft? Why don't you put up or shut up?

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[whereareweheadedto]

I'm slowly starting to get exasperated by this community over MS-Novell deal. I work for Novell partner shop and wasn't happy with this, but when I read different statements, I got calmer and I'm pretty much waiting the outcome. But some of the statements here are plain nonsense. Conspiracy is everywhere, Novell bad, bad!! I know Hula, as I do many other open source projects. It is in no way a MS Exchange replacement. Could never be, as far as I'm concerned. I realise that it's very hip to complain and yawn about Novell. Don't forget that it was Novell that opensourced their Netmail project and enabled the start of Hula. To think that there were people coding Hula and getting paid is in itself worth a mention. There aren't many companies where you'd see that. While everybody is talking about Hula and how it could replace Exchange, I saw nobody even mention Groupwise. For most of you that do not know the product, it's full colaboration suite, not free or anything, but it runs also on Linux. I find that many times, when Novell name surfaces in discussions, people know only about Netware and that's it. If Novells marketing would do it's job properly, MS wouldn't sleep as calmly as it does now.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[NickFortune]

Yeah, and 'welch' is an archaic spelling of 'welsh'.

I'll have to take your word for it.

It most likely originated as a slur of some kind.

Well, clearly it's not a nice thing to say. I still think it's a bit of a stretch to say it was intended to apply to the entire population of the Principality of Wales. Personally I think that if you dug deep enough, you probably find out it commemmorates Joshia Welch of 1900s early New York, famous for never repaying a debt. Or something like that, since I just made that up by way of example.

In any case, you don't hear this usage much in Wales

You don't hear it much in England either, in my experience. Which is odd, because if it was a slur against the Welsh, then England is where I'd expect to find it most used. If only because I don't think many other nations have strong feelings for the Welsh one way or another, let alone particularly any particular dislike of them. My impression is that it seems to be a US idiom, which is why I think it's probably the surname of some early settler.

Of course. the surname probably originally meant "from Wales", so I suppose if you were desperate to take offence you could do. It still seems a bit overly PC to me.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Nat Friedman]

Have you yourself never started a project and decided not to finish it?

Novell would be *ecstatic* if some of the great developers in the Hula community continued to carry Hula forward.

Good lord, Bruce, your character smearing of Novell is reaching new lows. To imply that this decision has anything to do with Novell's commitment to the free software community is just offensive.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[gilboad]

Try the web next time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens

- Gilboa

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[WilliamSChips]

I was asking an Anonymous Coward, not Bruce Perens. The Anonymous Coward asked what software Bruce Perens had written recently. So I asked the AC what software he had written ever.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[gilboad]

OK. Got lost in the thread. My mistake.

- Gilboa

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[slaida1]

Nice racial slur you've got there

Heh reading posts like that brings a mental image of CCG (collectible card game) noob in a tournament: he has the basic deck, basic moves and basic tactics. He occasionally wins but most of the time opponents know already what his cards are: racism, house analogy, ad hominem, car analogy, straw man, etc.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[mrdaveb]

I'll have to take your word for it.

As in 'royal welch fusiliers'.

My impression is that it seems to be a US idiom

It seems fairly common in australia as well.

I suppose if you were desperate to take offence you could do. It still seems a bit overly PC to me.

The origin could conceivably be unrelated. A quick google didn't turn up anything more substantial than a list of ethnic slurs on wikipedia. It just seems a little crazy to me that there's a derogatory term sharing the same word as a nationality

I'm not going to go ape about it. I'm not even Welsh, I'm from England!

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[NickFortune]

As in 'royal welch fusiliers'.

OK, conceded :) I've never seen that written down before, so I've always assumed it was spelt "Welsh"

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Brandybuck]

I'm one of the guys who wrote "their" products.

Let me wipe the spittle off of the inside of my screen, and rephrase my advice: "If you don't want Novell using your software, don't make it free."

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

If you don't want Novell using your software, don't make it free.

You must think my software was a gift, and you're confusing "gift" and "free".

My software is shared with everyone, with several pages of rules enforcing that sharing. Novell engineered a way to contravene those rules in bad faith.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Brandybuck]

I meant free as in Free Software. Which of the FSF's four freedoms is Novell restricting in regards to your software?

p.s. I'm not just saying this to be contrary, as they're disributing my software as well. But I haven't found evidence that they're taking away any of those four freedoms from on of my users.

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

Which of the FSF's four freedoms is Novell restricting in regards to your software?

Freedom 0: the freedom of anyone who is not a Novell customer to run the program. This seems to apply to Freedom 2 and 3 as well.

Bruce

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Brandybuck]

Freedom 0: the freedom of anyone who is not a Novell customer to run the program.
Why not? If someone gives me a copy of SuSE, I am free to use it. I might not be protected from any patent fireballs Microsoft may launch in the future, but I'm still free to use it. My situation is no different if MS/Novell never made this deal.

The evil in this deal isn't that it violates the license, but rather that it's an explicit patent threat by Microsoft.

RMS doesn't seem to think the MS/Novell deal violates the GPL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=16595

Re:Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement

[Bruce Perens]

I might not be protected from any patent fireballs Microsoft may launch in the future, but I'm still free to use it.

Let's go over that carefully. The four freedoms long definition for Freedom 0 includes:

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity.

A paid-up SuSE user can use that software without being sued by Microsoft. If you use it without paying SuSE, or indeed if you let your subscription lapse, Microsoft can, at its option, bring a lawsuit against you for doing so. Thus "any person" does not have the freedom in this case. According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association's 2006 economic survey, the cost of even proving yourself innocent can range from three to five Million dollars. That is a pretty big "fireball".

By the way, RMS said that specific language of the GPL did not come into play, not that the spirit of the GPL wasn't violated. It certainly was. There is no chance that the spirit of the GPL was to enforce a prohibition on discriminatory licenses but not on covenants that had the same effect.

By the way, would you believe that this method of brewing beer wasn't invented until 1993? I wouldn't either.

Bruce

Exchange Gift

[Eberlin]

Didn't Ximian do some sort of connector that let the Evolution mail client deal with MS Exchange servers? I haven't followed how that has propagated onto other e-mail clients yet. If I remember correctly, Ximian didn't release the code, but when Novell acquired them, the code was opened up.

From the perspective of the MS-Novell pact and this latest action, I'm wondering how the ol' Ximian Connector will fare in this whole debacle. After all, it was marketed as one more reason not to get an MS OS since some were holding onto their Windows version just to get access to MS Exchange.

With Novell supposedly getting "inside information" from MS, they couldn't risk doing the Hula anymore.

Re:Exchange Gift

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian Connector was a poor alternative to MS Exchange. It works by parsing the Exchange webmail interface...which kinda defeats the purpose because it requires the Exchange server to have webmail enabled. In the cases that webmail is disabled, XC will not work. In the cases that webmail is enabled, what's the purpose of Ximian Connector?

Cheerio,
D.

Re:Exchange Gift

[treke]

The code was opened up and it made it into the evolution source releases. I don't think it really went anywhere else though.

Re:Exchange Gift

[kimvette]

Unless you're running MSIE, outlook web access sucks. That's one reason that one would choose Evolution over the web interface.

Interoperability, anyone?

[mcrbids]

Remember when the deal between Microsoft and Novell was to "encourage interoperability"?

Here's that "interoperability" at work, folks...

Re:Interoperability, anyone?

[1310nm]

Microsoft has done a fine job of creating proprietary interoperability between its server platform and its desktop platform. Look at all fancy hooks Exchange can be equipped with: Windows Mobile, LCS, OWA, SharePoint...why let Novell muck things up when you're pumping hush...er...investment money into them?

Calendar Sharing

[anagama]

For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it. I do recall being excited by Hula when I heard about it before because it seemed like "finally" something would happen. So I'm dissapointed by this news.

My present solution is for my secretary to manage my calendar with korganizer -- I then just overwrite my calendar on my mac laptop (ical works fine with the korganizer files). But it would be nice to not have to call her up and say "please put ____ on my calendar." I'd rather just do it and have the calendars sync up. The ics files are understandable text files and I've thought of trying to make a sync system by comparring the files on my computer and my secretary's, but I just dabble at computer stuff -- I'm not a real programmer and I can't risk my calendar to my low quality skills. So still I wait.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I can't say that I've tried it, but does Google's calendar feature offer collaboration features?

Re:Calendar Sharing

[zulux]

It's a bitch to setup - but multiple uses who have the calendar plugin for Thunderbird (Mac, Linix, *BSD, Windows) can all edit an ical file on a WebDAV server.

Hints:

Create a blank ical file first and move it to the WebDAV server - don't create the blank file directly with Thunderbird.
Test the WebDAV server with Windows Explorer.
With WebDAV and a good setup of rsnapshots - you can make your own psudo-Sharepoint that does what most 10-50 person offices really need.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[dr.badass]

Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it.

CalDAV is the standard upon which the Hula calendar was based, so that's a name for what you're looking for. Conveniently, the next version of iCal (included with Leopard) supports it, and the server portion is open source, in case anyone was going to start crying about that.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote for:

http://www.google.com/calendar/

and for offline (never used it):

http://www.calgoo.com/

Re:Calendar Sharing

[LeFaux]

If you used Lotus Notes you could do that today. It is easy to setup and it works. Lotus/Domino is the top of the heap when it comes to mail calender integration.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[asuffield]

For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar.

Virtually nobody is the least bit interested in such functionality, because everybody just tells their secretary their password and has them edit their calendar directly.

Only geeks (== not business users) keep their passwords secret. Sad but true.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Firstmanonmars]

There is a small application called MS Exchange that has this functionality built in.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Psiren]

This in a nutshell is why people continue to happily use Microsoft software. It just works for most people. Now, you can with a bit fiddling get something like this setup in Linux, but install Exchange and use Outlook and it becomes a doddle. We switched from using IMAP and a crufty Webmail setup to Exchange and are now far more productive.

This the biggest problem facing the open source community as I see it. Very few groups are taking a step back to look at the big picture, to solve the big problems. Yes, most of what you can do in Windows you can do in Linux, but sometimes it takes a great deal of effort to put all the pieces together, and for many companies it's far easier, quicker and cheaper to just pay for off the shelf software to do all the hard work for you.

And before someone jumps in with the whole security and virus argument, it just doesn't wash. It's disturbingly easy to keep a secure Windows network with a decent firewall and some centrally managed anti-virus. We've been doing it for years with no problems whatsoever.

As a long time (10+ years) Linux user, I'm hugely impressed with how things have changed for the better, especially in the last few years. Things are improving constantly. It just has so much further to go before it's a viable alternative to Microsoft's offerings for most businesses.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[munwin99]

This is exactly the argument I was making on the Ubuntu boards a while back. We need some "complete" sets of packages, ready to go, that have the hard work of integration done. Stuff like a Groupware server based on existing programs (Sendmail, Postfix, iCal Server, some AntiVirus, Spamassassin), yes, I know there are eGroupware, et al - this is an example.

Ubuntu has gone some of the way with their Ubuntu Server - just select LAMP, and there you go. What about others for OpenLdap, some sort of SharePoint replacement, etc, etc. I'm sure the individual programs exist, they just need to be packaged together in a single apt-get install (sorry for the Apt bias) integrated package...

See the below thread for some more info.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=191858

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Scott7477]

What, precisely, is a doddle? As a Yank that's a term I've never seen before. Seriously, though, I think that your analysis of the integration problems that the OS community has are right on.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Macka]

Calgoo seems like a brilliant solution ... right up to the point where you agree to the EULA. Basically you agree to them delivering targeted adverts in Calgoo along with your calendar data. You agree to them withdrawing the service at any time, for any reason, with no regard or responsibility for your calendar data. You also acknowledge that they (on request) will give any and all information they have on you to any legal body requesting it, and that includes the contents of your calendars. And lastly, they state you're only allowed to use it for personal use not business.

And it looked so promising.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[avatar4d]

SugarCRM looks like a good solution. It might be overkill for what you need, but I believe it will do the job.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[AmazingRuss]

I know nothing about how the files are stored for korganizer, but from what you have described, rsync might be just the thing.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[dhasenan]

It is easy to setup and it works.

Well, I don't doubt that it works. But I've actually used it. The whole concept of an ID file when it's merely going to hash something and send that to a central server (probably to combat the eight-character password foolishness), and trying to check someone else's mail unless you set up your own specific location at each and every computer you need to use, and the horrible menu system, and the fact that it's a horribly large and complex piece of software built on Java so it takes a Vista-ready system to run it at all--and on Linux, it requires 3GB of space on the hard drive.

On Linux, Lotus is not even an option. On Windows, it may be the only piece of software with all the required features, but even so, only masochists will willingly use it.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[thomasdn]

but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it.Google Calendar will let you do that: http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/overview.html

Re:Calendar Sharing

[anagama]

Realisticly, such a solution wouldn't work because even my calendar information can contain confidential information so letting google have it won't work out.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[elsilver]

My present solution is for my secretary to manage my calendar with korganizer -- I then just overwrite my calendar on my mac laptop (ical works fine with the korganizer files). But it would be nice to not have to call her up and say "please put ____ on my calendar." I'd rather just do it and have the calendars sync up.

"I call up my secretary" says the guy surfing Slashdot.

Perhaps your problem could be solved by not spending your time reading Slashdot. Then you'd have enough time to do all those little things your secretary does, like maintain your calendar. Suddenly, I imagine the whole problem of syncing would go away.

See, this works out well all around -- you solve your syncing problem and you save your employer the expense of some syncing program, the expense of a useless secretary, and you get a big bonus because your employer is astonished at your improved productivity. Well, almost all around -- there's probably an out of work secretary who's now going to hunt me down.

Oh, for those wondering, yes, I am posting from work; yes, I recognize the irony. But I don't have a secretary, so all's good.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[kaoshin]

If you used Lotus Notes you could do that today.

Honestly, there are some very useful things that notes offers. The majority of people who complain about Notes (as notes developers such as Dave Delay have stated) are actually making complaints against the client mail and calendar functionality. Although notes is groupware and there may be reasons to recommend it, the calendar/mail functionality it offers is certainly not one of those reasons. Although it has improved, it has certainly not impressed me. It may not blow, but it sure as hell sucks.

"It is easy to setup...

Notes is not easy to set up. The last three companies I have worked in had very skilled teams of administrators and in each scenario they gave up and fell back on Exchange due to massive issues and user acceptance problems.

...and it works"

So does everything, except stuff that doesn't work at all.

"Lotus/Domino is the top of the heap when it comes to mail calender integration."

This may be accurate, depending on which type of heap you are talking about :)

Re:Calendar Sharing

[anagama]

Well exactly. I was doing this in th 90s when I worked for an employer. Now I have my own small office running on linux desktops and mac laptops. The expense involved in something like exchange is not worth the added convenience -- I don't want to spend $400 for a 5 user exchange server, plus whatever the requisite MS OS costs, plus buy another computer -- that's easily more than $1000.

What would be nice for very small businesses such as mine, is a linux based calendering system. It doesn't even have to be free (in any sense) -- but less than $150 would be about the right price (but not a yearly subscription, at least 10 users). It just doesn't makes sense though to spend more than that on a four person office when my current cludge works adequately (secretary makes all changes, I just copy the calendar from her computer to mine).

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bluesman]

You don't have to be from the UK. If you'd played Lemmings, the best game ever, you'd know :-)

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bluesman]

Oh, and a doddle appears to be a way to say something's easy.

Same as "a walk in the park."

Re:Calendar Sharing

[anagama]

Sugar Calendar integrates with Microsoft Outlook so you can manage meetings and calls and record them into a customer's account history.

I don't have any MS software in my office so I don't think this is going to work for me.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[anagama]

Perhaps -- each block that makes up an entry has start and end tags as well as some tags in the middle for various kinds of data -- each entry might differ in data types depending on what is recorded (e.g., one might have id, date, time, description, note; and another just id, date, time, description). What needs to happen is the two files must be compared and then where they are different, changes made So if Cal_1 is missing an entry on Cal_2, it would be added to Cal_2. If both have different versions of the same event -- then probably pick the latter one, or present a choice to the user. I'm not an rsync wizard though so whether it would do this or not means much googling which I'll do if I ever have a free moment not occupied by slashdot.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[krakrjak]

Just setup WebDAV and have KOrganizer load it from the WebDAV. It fully supports this and I'll bet so does the OS X Calendar.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Overzeetop]

Yes, but wouldn't it be nice not to have to pay $1k plus hardware to get a MS server with Exchange just to share contacts and calendar between two people? That's the way my office is. I'm too busy (and don't want to be interrupted) to do that stuff, and my admin needs access to my contacts and calendar. Unfortunately, that isn't possible in any realtime way using exchange. I would switch if there were sonething else out there, but apparently there isn't anything mature enough to use in a business envronment under a grand. What makes it worse is that I sync my pda so I have my info with me, but - again - there don't seem to be programs that will integrate with a PDA, especially a win based pda (my next smartphone will be one).

When I look for alernatives, all I see are big solutions for big dollars, to be administered by full time professionals.

FWIW, I ended up getting SBS and installing it on a temporarily vacant machine to see if I could get everything to sync up. We'll see if it works.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[askegg]

The simple sharing of events/etc in Hula looked great. Hopefully Apple's upcoming CalDAV implementation in Leopard will be just as good.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[thorsen]

There is a solution to your situation, and it even lets you stay with KOrganizer. Here's the setup:

Postfix and Cyrus imapd on the server. This is the part that gives you a single place to hold all your email, calendar and contacts and share access with others.

On the client side, you use KMail to access the imap server. Hint: Use disconnected IMAP instead of online IMAP - it's just better. In KMail setup, you go to misc->groupware, activate the IMAP resource functionality, and set your IMAP inbox as the place you hold the things. This gives you a set of subfolders that will hold the contacts, calendar items, notes, and todos. Sync your mail account. Right click on the calendar folder, choose properties, access control, and add your secretary.

Go to the KDE control center and choose KDE components->KDE resources. For contacts, calendar and notes you now add the imap resource and remove the other resources.

Now start up Kontact or the individual apps, and reimport your saved calendar and contacts.

When your secretary accesses the imap server, he/she will get access to your calendar/contacts folder (if you gave that access). He needs to set the properties on the folders and choose the contents to be calendar/contacts/whatever and to also do the resources and IMAP groupware setup.

It's so complicated to do the initial setup, but it actually works really well. I was part of the team that wrote all of this as part of the Kolab project, and I've used it for almost four years now.

It's even possible to share calendar, mail and contacts with Outlook users, but that's a longer story.

I hope it will help you and others.

Bo Thorsen,
Thorsen Consulting.
www.thorsen-consulting.dk - Qt expert services.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[toganet]

I'm sorry, but you are simply mistaken, or naive. Back when I did "user support" in a medium-sized company, shared calendars (using Exchange) was one of the basic, core applications that users relied one. Typically this meant a assistant managing their boss's calendars, but we also had people managing multiple calendars, department calendars, shared group calendars, etc. -- all from a single MS Outlook instance.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bert64]

Funnily enough, unix has had this for years...
Systems running CDE (That is most commercial unixes since the early 90s) came with CMSD, the Calender Management Service Daemon (not sure about service daemon... first part is correct) which let users share calendars...
However, aside from a few gaping security holes which let people remotely own your boxes, very few people actually used CMSD for it's intended purpose.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bert64]

You have to agree to a lot of those things when you use microsoft products too...

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bert64]

Horde...
OpenXchange
OpenGroupware
PHPGroupware
Zimbra
etc etc... Most offer a web based interface, and some let you connect certain clients to them, all are free and most are relatively easy to set up.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Bert64]

You can use sync4j/funambol (www.funambol.com) to sync with your mobile device... I believe it can use CalDAV or iCal servers at the backend to get its data from, and there are plenty of clients and web based solutions which will be able to sync with caldav servers.
Sync4j is great because it can sync with virtually any mobile device, not just certain types of PDA. It will quite happily sync with quite a large number of regular cellphones too, and it can do it over the network (so you get updates even when your out of the office).

Re:Calendar Sharing

[fimbulvetr]

Can you explain why disconnected IMAP is better than online IMAP? Also, is there a howto for the "longer story" of how to get outlook to play nicely?

Thanks for the info you've already given though.

Re:Calendar Sharing

[0racle]

Just like nobody is interested in the Mail Merge or the advanced features of Office, right?

Re:Calendar Sharing

[Allador]

"For business users, I think the lack of an integrated way to share calendars is a real shame. I realize that such things probably aren't that glamorous -- but I'd love to be able to edit my calendar and have my secretary edit my calendar. Maybe there is something that lets that happen right now and if so, I'd love to hear about it."

Exchange + Outlook. Been doing it for the better part of a decade.

In a small business, you can purchase SBS for a couple hundred dollars, which includes server 2003 and Exchange for cheaper than server 2003 by itself. This also includes the licenses for Outlook, so you dont have to buy Office if you dont already have it.

given MS parlay into VM solutions

[shareme]

Given MS parlay into VM solutions competing with VMware.. Mono and SuSE developers are next to be dumped by Novell..

That's Novell for you.

[khasim]

As a company, they should be doing everything they can to port their profitable apps to the major platforms out there.

Right now, GroupWise is a maojor bitch to install on Debian/Ubuntu. It's easier to install it on Windows. A lot easier. You just run the executables that Novell provides.

Novell needs to learn that migrations are a step-by-step process. And once you start helping your customers make those steps to a competitor, you aren't getting them back.

Debian may be a competitor (or not) to their basic server platform. But putting GroupWise on Debian means that you have moved them closer to your company.

Putting GroupWise on Windows means you've moved them closer to Microsoft.

The same with eDirectory, ZENworks and just about every other Novell product available.

Re:That's Novell for you.

[Zonnald]

Somebody get a doctor, this guy just shot his own foot.
If you implement the services et al better than Microsoft, then why would your clients need big support contracts?

How long do you think before the "We're paying how much per month? We haven't made a support call in 11 months, let's can this (support contract)." comments start flying around the accounts department.

Because they already have one?

[jayhawk88]

While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange.

I know it'll never happen, but I've said many times before, the best thing Novell could do for their Linux interests is open source Groupwise.

2007: In other news

[denis-The-menace]

Novell has introduced Tux-change, a MS-sanctioned port of Exchange for Windows
The company also states that it will soon release it own version of CIFS after the SAMBA organisation was sued into bankruptcy.

Wake up, Neo!

[kan0r]

I see the end coming, I see the darkness spreading. [...] ..and you are all that stands in his way.
(Scary music fading in the background)

As one great American Marine once said...

[__aaclcg7560]

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

Linux-based Exchange server?

[Jim Hall]

From the Hula Project web site:

Hula is a [Linux-based] mail and calendar server with a friendly web-interface designed for a great user experience.

So if Novell has taken all their FT developers off Hula, are we to assume that Microsoft is now going to offer a Linux-native version of the Exchange server? I mean, come on. If Microsoft-Novell is really serious with their "we are working on Linux-Windows interoperability" then they're dropping out of Hula in order to work on their Linux-native of the Exchange server, right??

I mean, the only other possibility is that Microsoft "asked" Novell to stop supporting a direct competitor for a Microsoft product. And that would just be silly of them, wouldn't it...

[/sarcasm]

Re:Linux-based Exchange server?

[Anonymous Coward]

[double-plus sarcasm]
I know. Maybe Novel pulled their full-time developers off Hula because Microsoft is about to assign some of their developers to work on it full-time? Or maybe both an official Linux server and client for Exchange? You know, to enhance interoperability?
[/double-plus sarcasm]

Re:Linux-based Exchange server?

[invisik]

Novell already has GroupWise. They really don't need another mail system. And they aren't going to stop developing it because MS asks them to--it's a revenue generator. NetMail/Hula is not much of an Exchange competitor IMHO.

I believe that's why they open-sourced NetMail/Hula in the first place--to start getting it off their plate and onto someone elses who wants to run with it. Novell (and any company in the world) has a finite amount of programming resources and they cannot take on everything, as much as they do or don't want to.

To my knowledge, NetMail was never really a full-featured desktop mail server anyway. It was a great large-scale webmail system and that's about it. I don't think that's the same boat that Exchange (or GroupWise for that fact) is in.

Besides, as someone mentioned above, I think Zimbra is the winner here anyway.

-m

Re:Linux-based Exchange server?

[OutOnARock]

C'mon, MS will NEVER create a Linux based Exchange server or a native Linux client.

The server will never happen because MS will never cede an inch in the server battle.

The client is already there in the form of Outlook Web Access. The latest release is sweet enough for any company to tell its Linux geeks to use that as their mail tool.

Maybe there it has been done already.

[LWATCDR]

What about Zimbra and Kolab?
Both offer similar functionality to Exchange.
While an Exchange server killer would be really nice it seems to me as there are already too many clients and ideas floating around with not real direction.
Novell is a company and it's primary job is to make money by making their customers happy. I could very well be that the majority of their paying customers already have an E-Mail solution in place.
Of course it is FOSS so if it is worth doing maybe the Ubuntu team will pick it up.

I'm just asking, seriously.....

[LibertineR]

Okay, hate Microsoft all you want, but will someone tell me just what is so wrong with Exchange Server that makes it such a target for Open Source replacement? Is it that Exchange is basically an anchor for Windows Servers, or does anyone have a problem with Exchange itself?

When you consider the available alternatives, is their any room here for suggesting that in this ONE case, Microsoft did something right, when it comes to Exchange Server? I would like someone to honestly tell me either that Exchange has problems that need fixing, or that Exchange must go for Linux to gain more share in the Enterprise space.

Which is it, and why?

Disclaimer: I was on the original Exchange team, but no longer work for Microsoft. I'm really just curious at this point what is driving the anti-Exchange bandwagon, because I don't see a real, viable competitor out there.

Enlighten me.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[nuzak]

> Okay, hate Microsoft all you want, but will someone tell me just what is so wrong with Exchange Server that makes it such a target for Open Source replacement?

It only runs on Windows? Duh.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[drinkypoo]

Okay, hate Microsoft all you want, but will someone tell me just what is so wrong with Exchange Server that makes it such a target for Open Source replacement?

First, it only runs on Windows, and thereby supports the Microsoft monopoly. Second, when it craps all over itself and corrupts your mail, it's nightmarishly hard to recover any new mail that came in after your last backup. Or so I'm told - so far I've avoided ever having to actually deal with it.

Many of us simply believe that Microsoft, which has been convicted of anticompetitive behavior in multiple countries, should not be supported at all. Ever. Period.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[PCM2]

Disclaimer: I was on the original Exchange team, but no longer work for Microsoft. I'm really just curious at this point what is driving the anti-Exchange bandwagon, because I don't see a real, viable competitor out there.

I dunno. I've never had to do it myself, but everybody I know who's ever had to manage and maintain an Exchange server hates it. Maybe it's getting better over time. But it seems to definitely have its faults, in which cause the fact that there's no real, viable competitor is what makes people wish there was one. Make sense?

Is it commonplace for Microsoft employees (and former Microsoft employees) to develop the attitude that market competition is the equivalent of terrorism? I'm just asking. Enlighten me.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[DragonWriter]

Okay, hate Microsoft all you want, but will someone tell me just what is so wrong with Exchange Server that makes it such a target for Open Source replacement?

For many open-source idealists, it is a major target because it is (1) commonly used, (2) in a business-critical role, and (3) close-source.

I would like someone to honestly tell me either that Exchange has problems that need fixing, or that Exchange must go for Linux to gain more share in the Enterprise space.

Since Exchange server doesn't run on Linux, clearly the perceived need for Exchange is a barrier to Linux advancement, whether or not Exchange also has functional problems, but many people who want Linux to advance (probably virtually all of them that don't have a financial stake in some Linux-oriented business) are open-source idealists that want open-source software to become more dominant, and Exchange is, simply by its own dominance, a target for that, besides any barrier it poses to Linux adoption.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The real issue isn't that Exchange is good or not, but that it is a proprietary standard (oxy moron I know) and there are no other options (specifically other platforms) you can use to interface with it professionally (ie seamless). The MS solution is to run your entire enterprise on Windows, which as a company I can understand. But there are other people using other operating systems for workstations, and for good reason. So just interfacing with Exchange is a basis for the "OS War".

There is no great alternative to exchange in the OSS realm. To some degree that does show that MS did a good job with Exchange, since it seems to be difficult for the OSS community to reproduce such software at the same calibre. But the real story is that Exchange has so much of the market, and is already doing an effective job, that the OSS community is instead trying to interface with exchange instead of replacing it. And in lots of shops, Exchange + Windows is fine and working for 100+ workstations but for the 20+ or so that can't be Windows, they are SOL.

What I (and I would think lots of other people) would like to see is MS develop a *nix client to interface to an Exchange server (even if the server had to be MS based). Those of us who haven't totally sworn off MS, or don't think they are inherently evil, would buy said software, and implement it in our systems where needed. What pisses this sys admin off is when something like an e-mail client/server issue has to dictate several hundred OS purchases.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[frank_adrian314159]

When you consider the available alternatives, is their any room here for suggesting that in this ONE case, Microsoft did something right, when it comes to Exchange Server?

This statement shows that the person involved has never programmed against Exchange.

In everything from malformed SMTP interfaces to obtuse API's, this server made Lotus Domino look like a shining example of programming ease (and anyone who's programmed against Domino knows what a low bar that is). The administration might be OK (unless you were trying to cluster and auto-failover one of them), but from a programming point of view, Exchange sucks hard. Maybe things have changed in the past three years, but to me, using the phrase "did something right" and the word Exchange in the same sentence is oxymoronic to any programmer who has to interface to its APIs at a sufficiently low level.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[mrsmiggs]

I've absolutely no idea how good the code in exchange is or if indeed it is value for money for companies but I know one thing it keeps everyone locked into Windows. Go through the conversion from Windows to Linux and people can accept the change of GUI, a bit of retraining and most users could probably live with Open Office but the question remains how do you replace Exchange? For all the advantages of Linux and all problems of Windows; Exchange remains an unmovable object, you could use a 3rd party client but that would be at best feeble and at worst unsupportable. Crack the market for Exchange with a scalable solution which goes above and beyond the features in MS Exchange and you take away many techies excuse to stay Microsoft Previously I'd have said IBM with Notes and Novell with Groupware (or whatever it's called) should get together with some old fashioned Open Source enthusiasm and take Exchange on but with Novell's recent agreement with Microsoft this looks further realisation than ever before. For shame.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[shywolf9982]

Well, apart the fact it doesn't run on Linux, or Mac OSX?

Exchange is a good piece of software, and is a key part of the overall integrated server system that Microsoft offers. I've been using Exchange 2003 (and administering it) for about an year at my job, and my major complaint is about something that has been added in the most recent iteration: the seemingly impossibility to retrieve a single mail from a backup.

We used to made daily backups, and one day my boss came up and was like "uh, I think a week ago I accidentally deleted a very important mail, can you retrieve it for me into the backups?" and I was like "for sure!".

But apparently, the idiot they hired to replace you (I know it was possible to retrieve a single mail from a backup atleast until Exchange 7 or maybe even 2000) thought that this was a very dangerous operation to allow, and I was presented two choices:

• Restore all the mailboxes to day X (uh yeah, everybody's gonna love it)
• I mentioned a second choice? Oh my bad, I miscounted

You probably detected some serious hate surface between the waves of sarcasm, and I hope you can understand why. I mean, that's the only real complaint I have against Exchange, and is probably not too representative, but I somewhat got the idea that the application is now in its descending curb.

Overall anyway, Exchange offers great features: and from a users' point of view, is a good application. As developer, I might bitch about the lack of support for standards, but yeah, that's a long issue.

And the OSS community wants to "clone" it in term of functionality because it works, not because we think it sucks. Elseway, we wouldn't bother. Now, it's just a pity that due to IP fears you cannot particicpate to the developement of any open-source alternative...

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[Jimbosis]

Fully agreed - there is no viable single competitor to Exchange. I wrote an article for Redmond magazine on open source alternatives to Exchange last year and came to the conclusion that any sys admin who tried to replace Exchange with open source would be drawn and quartered. The problem isn't just replicating Exchange; it's achieving interoperability with Outlook. The core services in Exchange can be mapped reasonably closely by open source alternatives but there's a layer of obfuscation with MAPI that makes hosting Outlook messaging accounts on anything but Exchange a non-trivial task. Exchange is one of Microsoft's 5 products that generates more than a billion a year (Server, XP, SQL, Office are the other four) and, IMHO, the most vulnerable to open source encroachment. Outlook is one of the most effective products Microsoft has for preventing migration and until there's a seamless way to tie Outlook with an open source backend, it won't catch. BTW, Jamie Zawinksi wrote a brilliant essay called Groupware Bad while worth looking at.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[goodtim]

I don't see a real, viable competitor out there.

Novell GroupWise?

The company I work for (mid-sized manufacturing) is a Novell shop. We are in the process of getting NetWare out, and moving to Linux. Until working here I was never familiar with GroupWise. While it is not the end-all, be-all of messaging platforms, it is by far less of a castrafuck that is Exchange or even Notes. Is runs on Linux (both Client and Server) has all the functionality that is needed - mobile messaging, webmail, etc. The only drawback is the horrible management interface (ConsoleOne). But there are third party apps to replace that.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[LibertineR]

"Is it commonplace for Microsoft employees (and former Microsoft employees) to develop the attitude that market competition is the equivalent of terrorism?"

Come on, dude.

What I was getting at, is that maybe Open Source needs to not try to compete with Exchange, and come up with a whole new thinking behind Messaging\Calendar\Scheduling instead? As for market competition, that is exactly what I am asking about; Where is it with respect to Exchange? Why do so many think that Microsoft should just play fair and give up? You would have to be some kind of nut to think that Microsoft would not use every advantage available to them to stomp competition. That is BUSINESS!

Why cant Microsoft stomp Google? Google changed the game, and didn't try to fight on Microsoft's turf. I think Open Source needs to do the same thing. What stops Open Source? Lack of a profit motive. Sorry to play the old "Greed is Good" line, but when it comes to motivating disparate entities to cooperate and collaborate effectively, Singing Kumbaya(lets all code for nothing but joy) wont do, my brother. Microsoft doesn't stop Open Source from competing more than Open Source stops itself.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[idlake]

For many open-source idealists, it is a major target because it is (1) commonly used, (2) in a business-critical role, and (3) close-source.

And Microsoft developers want Microsoft software to succeed because... what? The good of humanity? Who are you kidding?

Exchange is a target for replacement by open source software for the same reason a lot of commercial software is: its closed source nature causes numerous problems for end users: it's buggy, it's unreliable, it interferes with free market and customer choice, and it's way overpriced.

Of course, Exchange needs to be replaced. If open source didn't exist, it would have to be replaced by commercial competitors. It's just that Microsoft's monopolistic practices have killed all their serious commercial competitors, so that open source software is the only challenger that's left and that's strong enough to take them on.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[idlake]

I'm really just curious at this point what is driving the anti-Exchange bandwagon, because I don't see a real, viable competitor out there.

Yes, and that is exactly why there need to be competitors for Exchange. Maybe in Microsoft group-think, a single proprietary product from Microsoft is the way the world should run, but in reality, we live in a free market and buyers should have a choice. And they need a choice so that the client access license costs of $67/client are driven down.

Of course, the reasons buyers don't have a choice right now is because Microsoft has largely killed all the commercial alternatives through anti-competitive behavior like bundling, tying, and proprietary protocols. Open source is the only entity still capable of challenging Microsoft and giving users a choice.

I would like someone to honestly tell me either that Exchange has problems that need fixing,

You know, this question coming from someone on the Exchange team just leaves people speechless. To answer your question, apart from its anti-competitive design, yes, Exchange has technical problems.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[TooMuchToDo]

You must be new here =)

It doesn't matter how solid of a product Microsoft makes (latest versions of Exchange, Windows 2000/2003 Server, etc), people still whine that it:

a) costs money b) doesn't make their toast (lack-of-feature-x-whine) c) doesn't allow them to look at the source

Myself? I love Server 2003. It's solid. Very solid. It's competes for uptime against my Fedora Core DNS servers, and has no problem doing so. I'm absolutely looking forward to Exchange 2007 w/Unified Messaging. I think Microsoft overreaches sometimes, but some of their products are pretty damn good. Why can't IT folk simply use the best tool for the job? Sigh.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[idlake]

What I was getting at, is that maybe Open Source needs to not try to compete with Exchange, and come up with a whole new thinking behind Messaging\Calendar\Scheduling instead?

Why should open source do that? I mean, Microsoft copied just about every feature in Exchange from others.

In any case, open source has excellent and innovative solutions for messaging, calendaring, and scheduling. Attempts to be compatible with Exchange are there to make it easy for users to migrate off the Microsoft solution, not because they are the preferred open source solution.

What stops Open Source? Lack of a profit motive.

I don't see open source being "stopped" by anything. And you're seriously out of touch if you think that open source isn't motivated by hardcore dollars-and-cents considerations.

Why do so many think that Microsoft should just play fair and give up? You would have to be some kind of nut to think that Microsoft would not use every advantage available to them to stomp competition. That is BUSINESS!

Business are required by law to compete fairly. Exclusionary or monopolistic behavior is illegal. Unfortunately, it's a costly and lengthy procedure to hold companies responsible for violations, which is why Microsoft can get away with it again and again.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[JonJ]

Nice try Mr. Ballmer.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[Derblet]

You probably know this by now, but if you had a Deleted Item Retention period configured on the Mailbox Store, he could have recovered the mail himself, using Outlook. It will even retain a deleted mailbox for a configurable period.

Worst thing about Exchange is the constantly changing APIs. Ever tried to accept a meeting request using DAV?

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[DragonWriter]

And Microsoft developers want Microsoft software to succeed because... what? The good of humanity? Who are you kidding?

Hey, look, you've invented your own position to argue against that has nothing to do with what I said. Who are you kidding?

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[marcosdumay]

I didn't saw a clearer answer, so I'll post a late one...

Exchange is the one server that everybody uses and we can't replace with FOSS. And since we can't replace that sever, it must run on Windows, and most companies can't afford (or think they can't) to support both Linux and Windows servers. So, we get an all or nothing situation, where Linux gets nothing.

And, yes, Exchange has a lot of techinical flaws. It doesn't talk well with anithing, it is 'heavy' on its servers and it is not backup-friendly. But it worst flaw is that t runs on Windows, and Windows servers are hard to maintain. That is why we think that an Exchange server replacement that doesn't suck will be fastly adopted.

Re:I'm just asking, seriously.....

[idlake]

It was a rhetorical question; you should look up the concept.

My point was that your list of reasons made it sound like open source developers targeted Microsoft because they had some sort of irrational prejudices.

In fact, the reason to target Microsoft products is rational and economic, just like Microsoft's reason for being in business. Unlike Microsoft, open source developers don't engage in illegal monopolistic practices and instead make fulfilling the needs of users their primary objective. That's because they are the users: many open source developers have been screwed by companies like Microsoft one too many times and want to reduce their exposure to the risk that comes with building their business on proprietary software.

What timing.

[TheFlu]

What odd timing. I literally swapped out Hula this morning with Really Simple CalDAV Store. The only reason I used Hula was for it's CalDAV support, so that Evolution clients can work on a shared calendar. It worked fine for a while, but it started eating up 99% of the CPU on the server, so I had to dump it for something else. So far RSCDS seems to do the trick, but I haven't tested it extensively yet. You'd think a shared calender server wouldn't be very difficult to implement, but there doesn't seem to be many stable options in the Open Source world. Evolution's CalDAV support does seem to be a bit lacking, however, so that could be the bulk of my problem I imagine.

Thus far I've tried Hula, RSCDS, Cosmo, and Apple's CalendarServer and none of them seem to be the perfect solution. I'd love to see a package that acts as both a CalDAV server, but also gives you the ability to view and edit the calendars via a nice looking web-interface as well. I'm thankful for the projects that are currently being worked on however, and I guess I should stop complaining and start coding...

Re:What timing.

[Gothmolly]

It's called Exchange and OWA.

Re:What timing.

[cortana]

Whoa, that software looks pretty neat. Annoying that it requires its own VirtualHost however, and that the calendar URLs end up with index.php in their paths [and that it is written in PHP! ;)].

We get by with a simple WebDav share served by Apache. Unfortunately Evolution doesn't understand WebDav--you either need a full CalDav implementation, or you are stuck with read-only calendars via plain http.

Re:What timing.

[shywolf9982]

And wants register globals to be active, and that's enough for me to foresee it needs a little refreshing of the code.

Re:What timing.

[Karora]

Yeah, I know. It uses register globals in a safe way, but I need to bite the bullet one day and just disable it and go through my libraries and find where it's used. Probably I'm at that point now and should Just Do It :-) The problem is basically that the libraries I use have been written over the last five years or so and there are some places where that is expected. For all of the code written in the last couple of years (including the actual RSCDS code) it isn't required. Happy to accept patches, of course :-) Andrew McMillan.

Re:What timing.

[Karora]

I'd love to see a package that acts as both a CalDAV server, but also gives you the ability to view and edit the calendars via a nice looking web-interface as well

Cosmo does, of course. I don't intend to do that with RSCDS, although the current code (in Git) will let you see basic information it does not let you do any add / edit of the calendar entries, and presents events in a list, rather than as dates on a calendar.

If you do have any suggestions for improvements in RSCDS, please tell me about them though :-)

Thanks,
Andrew McMillan.

Re:What timing.

[rar]

I'd love to see a package that acts as both a CalDAV server, but also gives you the ability to view and edit the calendars via a nice looking web-interface as well.

Actually, I think the UNIXy way of doing this would be to get a web interface that connects to any generic CalDAV server. Just like e.g. squirrelmail uses a regular IMAP connection.

I tried to find some such calender web interface about a year ago, but with no luck. Has anyone seen anything like that?

Re:What timing.

[Karora]

Hmmmm...

Today I disabled register_globals to see what broke when I did so. To my surprise it appears that nothing does :-)

So I guess I need to update my documentation on that point!

Cheers,
Andrew McMillan.

Re:What timing.

[Karora]

Hi,

I've put a "don't require a whole virtual server" thing on the road map now, and will see if I can have that done before christmas.

The "caldav.php" in the URL can be pretty easily got rid of with a URL rewriting line, so I might add a note on how to do that to the installation docs, or somewhere in the Wiki as well.

Regards
Andrew McMillan.

Re:What timing.

[cortana]

Ok, that sounds great. I look forward to being able to swap out my current WebDAV share with RSCDS!

Re:What timing.

[Karora]

Looks like an early christmas this year. I've fixed the reasons why it wouldn't work in a subdirectory now, so it will be able to operate within a subdirectory of a virtual host from the next release.

I expect that will be in the next couple of days.

Regards,
Andrew McMillan.

Braveheart

[SQLz]

Memorable quote which kinda sums up the MS Novell deal.

Robert's Father: Longshanks acquired Wallace. So did our nobles. That was the price of your crown.

And dont tell me about Notes, please.

[LibertineR]

You haven't lived until you take over an account with a Notes server with 500 users in the Notesdata directory, and 400 of the id files are named "user.id".

Re:And dont tell me about Notes, please.

[marcushnk]

You haven't lived until you take over an account with a Notes server with 500 users in the Notesdata directory, and 400 of the id files are named "user.id".
hahahahahahaha. Been there done that mate :-)

a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumped

[Fox_1]

If I just had that I'd be rich,
I'm just bitter, I got burned when they did this a few years ago
my company, other companies, and about 200 of their own all screwed the day before we went live
by now though we should be thinking
"Fool me once
Shame on you
Fool me twice
Shame on me."
fool me three times - that's enemy action.

Scalix ...

[msimm]

I've personally used Scalix and I believe OpenXchange (although I didn't like the install process with OX so I dropped it pretty quickly). Scalix has one of the best installs I've seen with an application under linux in a while. I believe both OX and Scalix rely on plugins for Outlooks support. I'm currently waiting for Scalix 11 to be release and am planning to move our corporate server over to it (from plain-old Sendmail/imap/pop). I'm pretty sure I didn't use Zimbra because they didn't offer an open version (Scalix offers a community version with a license limitation thats pretty fair).

Re:Scalix ...

[aztektum]

"...I didn't use Zimbra because they didn't offer an open version."

clicky

Re:Scalix ...

[astro]

I used Scalix (Community Edition 8) in a corporate environment w/ outlook clients and pure webmail users for close to 2 years and it was simply a dream. We migrated to it when Samsung dropped Samsung Contact, which was adequate at best. Both are descendants of HP Openmail. I would select Scalix again in a heartbeat if the need arose (I am again in the private working-alone style of contracting for now, so groupware... not so much a need for it). I would recommend the combination of Scalix Server + Fedora Core to anyone, and that is from a non-Redhat-fan.

Re:Scalix ...

[CFrankBernard]

Also, Xandros Server bundles Scalix 10; an update that includes Scalix 11 is expected late January or early February 2007.

Re:Scalix ...

[misleb]

What I don't like about all the "exchange killers" that I have tried is taht they don't integrate with an external user directory. You have to recreate all of your users within the new system and sync passwords and groups. What a PITA. Any serious corporate groupware package has to integrate with ActiveDirectory or eDirectory or OpenDirectory or generic LDAP or all of the above.

-matthew

Re:Scalix ...

[ldapboy]

Watch this space...

Re:Scalix ...

[tenchiken]

Actually Zimbra does. It will use AD both for contact lookup and authentication.

Re:Scalix ...

[kimvette]

Scalix does. It's not plug and play, but it does integrate.

Re:Scalix ...

[msimm]

Interesting. I'm curious if this includes Outlook connectors (tasks, scheduling, calendar)?

You are missing the point.

[LibertineR]

The point of the question is: WHERE IS THE OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE?

Every time this subject comes up on /., you get myriad statements on how nice it would be to have integrated calendar/scheduling, et all, but is Open Source any closer to delivering on that? If not, why not? I ask because it would appear that there is not going to be a real Exchange alternative soon, and I wonder if energy might best be used on something else?

Its like Excel, in that whatever you come up with, it WONT be better, but maybe just as good? At what point, when you cant win the game, do you just CHANGE the game so you can win?

Again, I'm just asking.

Re:You are missing the point.

[Colin Smith]

The point of the question is: WHERE IS THE OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE?And you're missing the point of FOSS. There is no "THE" alternative. There are many alternatives. Yeah, I know you don't like that, but it's the truth. Eventually several good, competing, systems will gain popularity. Its like Excel, in that whatever you come up with, it WONT be better, but maybe just as good?Excel is just a VisiCalc clone, there's nothing compelling about it. There are many ways to improve on Excel, Lotus Improv was a much nicer concept.

Re:You are missing the point.

[drsmithy]

There are numerous open source exchange replacements. There are even more projects and protocols that replicate one part of the functionality. None of them are very widely adopted, however, because everyone is locked into exchange.

No, they're not widely adopted because, compared to Exchange, they suck.

If not for MS's monopoly abuse with that regard, there would be a demand for such a server and I imagine there would be one or more mature and common solutions by now.

There is plenty of demand for something that does what Exchange does. There just aren't many products that deliver (and none that deliver as well).

Re:You are missing the point.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There is plenty of demand for something that does what Exchange does.

Almost all office desktops are Windows machines. Those machines have the exchange protocol built in, and so does MS office. That being the case, a sysadmin can either install an all new toolset and put together a server, or they can just go with exchange which is much easier. Most do the latter. If exchange were not built into Windows and office, it would have competition. If the exchange protocol were open and documented as required by law, their would be alternative server implementations that compete. As it is, many shops just buy one exchange server and run everything else on Linux.

Re:You are missing the point.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah, if only there were some support for that opinion, like MS having been convicted in court of criminally abusing their monopoly in that specific way and fined millions for failing to stop that abuse... oh wait. Dumbass.

Re:You are missing the point.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

how many time do you plan to use that argument?

Constantly until the abuse stops.

"Linux going to take over the desktop" - 1999

Umm, this has jack and shit to do with anything I've said. If you can't even address my argument, why would anyone listen to you?

Re:You are missing the point.

[drsmithy]

Almost all office desktops are Windows machines. Those machines have the exchange protocol built in, and so does MS office.

A protocol on its own is useless (and irrelevant). You need Outlook (or a web browser) to get any real value out of Exchange - and Outlook doesn't come with Windows.

That being the case, a sysadmin can either install an all new toolset and put together a server, or they can just go with exchange which is much easier. Most do the latter.

Regardless of whether they use Exchange or some alternative, the same (conceptual - actual may differe depending on the quality of the product) amount of work is required.

* Windows Server does not include Exchange. It must be purchased and configured.

* Windows client does not include Outlook. It must be installed and configured.

Windows has no inherent advantage in this space. It dominates because it's *better*.

If exchange were not built into Windows and office, it would have competition.

Exchange is not "built in" to Windows. On the client side it requires either Outlook - a separate program - or a web browser to use[0]. On the server side it requires Exchange itself.

If the exchange protocol were open and documented as required by law, their would be alternative server implementations that compete.

Or maybe Exchange alternatives could innovate and compete on their own merits, rather than riding on the back of Exchange's established userbase. Ie: a complete client/server package.

Incidentally, I'm not aware of any law that requires protocols to be "open and documented".

As it is, many shops just buy one exchange server and run everything else on Linux.

Exactly. People use Exchange because it's the best option. Are you advocating people should be using Linux because it's Linux, not because it's the best solution ?

People like you need to stop trying to blame every lack of decent alternative software on the Windows "monopoly". It's fundamentally counter-productive. There is *nothing* stopping somebody creating a good Exchange alternative.

[0] By "use" I mean get value out of it over and above a simple mailserver. If all you want is email, any IMAP client will work (and Exchange server-side is massive overkill in that case anyway).

CalDAV to the rescue

[Wesley Felter]

iCal or Mozilla Lightning as the client, Leopard Server or OSAF Cosmo as the server.

Exchange is great

[everphilski]

Exchange is what keeps people locked into windows, honestly. That and Excel - 'calc' in OpenOffice blows. Open source projects have been trying to replace Exchange. I think the projects are just too fragmented, trying to compete with each other. If their forces combined maybe something would coalesce. There also seems to be a prevailing thought among a lot of developers of 'screw the corporate user' that as long as Linux works for hobbyists that's what its there for. Not everyone, but enough people to keep it from becoming mainstream.

But yes, Excel and Exchange are the two things Microsoft did absolutely right.

Re:Exchange is great

[timjdot]

Whats wrong with Calc? I think Calc is really good but have done tons more with Excel. Heck, I worked on a team which coded a full DSS in Excel macro plus a bunch of Perl and KSH back in the day. :-) Uh, does Excel even support Excel macro language any more? Guess it went the way of OLE and all the other technologies MSFT told us developers to use but never used themselves.

I haven't used Exchange for a long time. In remote, distributed offices one can do alot better with Evolution (great spam filtering), dotproject, and a few other tools. Plus, Courier is quite easy to configure. Of course I also don't have a fax machine so the nifty features of Exchange just are no longer needed by me. The problem with trying to make an app an infrastructure is the resulting products are bloatware. When you get an 80 deep call stack for any web request in WebLogic, then it's time to hit the reset/relearn button. When your answering machine requires $10k worth of Exchange licenses then you need to hit the rethink/clueless button.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/bizbook/ "The Business Guide to Free Information Technology". Free book. Software is FREE!

Re:Exchange is great

[miro f]

But yes, Excel and Exchange are the two things Microsoft did absolutely right.

I would say Excel, Exchange, and Visual Studio are the three things that Microsoft did right.

Re:Exchange is great

[everphilski]

Scripting, as you mentioned. And lots of little things. If you want to have a series, like =(A1+B1), and then drag it down a column, you get prompted with a dialog box asking if you really want it to fill those (previously empty column cells) with the formula or with another series (I forget all the options, one is linearly increasing, ie, 1, 2, 3, 4) ... well, duh, I want the formula I dragged! And plotting is pretty atrocious, the options are limited compared to Excel, the formatting is pretty weak. It is also prone to crashing if you have 2 copies open. I don't know why.

Not Surprised. Expect More Cuts

[segedunum]

I'm not suprised they're dropping Hula, or at least support in the form of developers for it. Hula was released simply because Novell had a ton of crufty Netmail code, didn't know what to do with it and couldn't make any money out of it.

Netmail was repackaged into Hula with a logo, snazzy graphics and a lot of pretty meaningless hype. The project didn't really do anything because everyone already had a POP/IMAP and SMTP server, and there were countless open source groupware and calendaring solutions around such as eGroupware, OpenGroupware and Kolab. Novell should have invested their time and effort into one of these and bit the bullet over Groupwise in order to really try and take the ubiquitous Exchange head-on in corporate environments and make some headway. However, Novell still seem to be flogging that rancid and long deceased horse called Groupwise for some reason. Every Novell using company that I know (Netware, Groupwise etc.) is using Exchange, and Novell were going to need to do something different to change that - remove licensing costs at the server and CAL ends, ensure trouble-free Exchange migrations, ensure there was a free and working Outlook plugin etc. etc. Basically, remove the barriers to actually moving away - something Novell is hopelessly poor at. All of their customers (apart from Suse) they have now are basically historical from the eighties and nineties, as you have to literally fight to buy anything from Novell.

Novell strikes me as a company in a spot of real bother, especially with financial results around the corner. Linux (Suse) revenue has not increased in any way that is going to sustain them as a company by itself, Red Hat is miles off in the distance, the Netware userbase is continuing to shrink which it was before Novell's Suse move, and worse, there is still no sign whatsoever that Novell is creating a Linux distribution with open source software that will replace Netware, functionally speaking, and completely satisfy their existing customer base and stop them leaving. Novell talks a lot about choosing a Netware or Linux kernel in OES (Open Enterprise Server) or virtualising Netware, as is, under Linux via Xen. That's the extent of their support of Netware and the roadmap that they have for it, and by all accounts their customers are less than impressed by it.

It seems as though Novell really needed that $300 million from Microsoft, and I would expect many more cutbacks on lots of open source projects and even the proprietary software that isn't making any money in the run up to the next round of financial results.

Re:Not Surprised. Expect More Cuts

[mythz]

Novell did not need a cash injection they need a sustainable business model. This is why they bought Suse, they are looking for a sustainable business model cause it seems that there is nothing they can do to bring back Netware. Why they haven't opensourced Netware I still don't understand.
Check out the link, for a company with a market cap of only 2.10B they have nearly 1.6B in current assets. This ration is almost unheard of in a technology company. The reason why they have such a small market cap is the lack of forseeable revenue.
Personally if I was them I would be stopping all non-profiting ventures and hire a ton of talenented programmers to cut code and outsource as consultants. That model appears to be working well for IBM.

Re:Not Surprised. Expect More Cuts

[segedunum]

Novell did not need a cash injection they need a sustainable business model.

Never was a truer thing said. However, Novell seem to be hopping from one set of financial results to another and not curing the true problem.

Why they haven't opensourced Netware I still don't understand.

That's certainly what I believe they should have done, and then worked and allowed Netware components and software to be integrated into one clear Linux distribution (and could be used in others) that would replace Netware, and that Novell could adequately support. Netware usage is declining whatever Novell does, so allowing their Netware software and tools to get much more widely used in the Linux world would be a massive plus.

You can't try and attract new Linux customers in a foreign and hostile market if your existing userbase is leaving you. You need to look after them.

Personally if I was them I would be stopping all non-profiting ventures and hire a ton of talenented programmers to cut code and outsource as consultants.

That's certainly one available option. However, the real problem is that they could make a decent business out of their Linux and Netware endeavours. Netware usage is declining yes, so look at why Netware is declining and listen to why people are jumping ship. Take those criticisms into account and build a Linux distribution that will more than satisfy them. Give them some cool looking graphical and administration tools that no one else has (Red Hat's are pretty woeful) and give people something to get excited about and want to stay.

The first phase of my Novell strategy would be to stop Netware users from leaving, and get ones who had left back, by giving them an absolutely stunning Netware replacement Linux distribution to use. No confusing Netware or Linux kernels and no 'virtualising Netware in Xen under Linux' unless absolutely necessary. Phase two would be to use that solid platform to attract new Linux customers, use good technology and features to steal people away from Red Hat and Sun and then use that to attack Windows. The sad thing is, it's doable.

Re:Not Surprised. Expect More Cuts

[segedunum]

I'm not too sure why you couldn't get Netware running on HP hardware, but it's not Novell's individual support of Linux and Netware I'm criticising. It's the fact that they haven't created a coherent and easy to use whole out of the two of them. No customer should be deciding which kernel to use or having to virtualise Netware under Xen.

You should get one OS with all the tools you need, and Novell should be providing a clear and coherent migration plan with all the training and documentation that you need.

Which OSS groupware server emulates MAPI?

[otis wildflower]

Can someone please link to a stable opensource groupware server that emulates MAPI so that Outlook or Entourage users can use it without plugins?

Re:Which OSS groupware server emulates MAPI?

[kandresen]

Maybe not because MAPI is a PROPRIETARY protocol... So maybe you don't find it as what you are asking for is illegal...

Extract from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAPI

MAPI refers both to the application programming interface as well as the proprietary protocol which Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Microsoft Exchange.

Re:Which OSS groupware server emulates MAPI?

[EzInKy]

Maybe not because MAPI is a PROPRIETARY protocol... So maybe you don't find it as what you are asking for is illegal...


It is not illegal to reverse engineer a protocol, except possibly in a handful of countries if encryption is involved.

Call to arms

[drDugan]

The MS/Novell deal and (almost) killing Hula may be connected, maybe not. It doesn't matter.

It represents the largest, most obvious call to arms for the open source community in years:

We need to build a viable Exchange killer: a open, free (as in speech) alternative for IT managers who would choose Exchange.

This would be a massive project, but so were the Linux Kernel, Apache, Samba, Sendmail and others. We probably would not want it to be a single application, like Exchange, complete with kitchen sinks and deck chair stands... but a suite of tools that mirrored functionality and talked seamlessly with existing Exchange installations would be adequate.

Re:Call to arms

[biglig2]

I'm no programmer, but would it be so big? It seems to me that such an application could and should off-load a lot of it's functionality onto other exsting products. In fact Exchange does this; it doens't have it's own SMTP components or web servers but uses the ones built-into Windows server.

There are plenty of good FOSS solutions for database, calendaring, sending mail, POP, IMAP, LDAP integration, etc. etc.

What is needed is a glue application together with some kind of standard for clients to use to communicate to it that sits in the middle of all this and integrates it. So that when you drag an e-mail to the calendar folder it makes an appointment for that user, and so on and so forth.

Oh, come on

[everphilski]

the open source project to build an exchange alternative Theres like, 5 different projects trying to achieve the Holy Grail of replacing Exchange. And Hula was far from the leader of the pack.

Re:Oh, come on

[timjdot]

Plus most email is still run through Sendmail and Postfix I'd wager.
Is HULA the same as Netware OpenExchange (SLOX) and its open source deriv?

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Serviza Monster Computers with Open Source Training Bundles

Re:Oh, come on

[stu42j]

Is HULA the same as Netware OpenExchange (SLOX) and its open source deriv?

No, completely different. Hula comes from Novell NetMail. SLOX came from SuSE.

Re:Oh, come on

[ToddFFW]

Zimbra baby! Even Bill Gates talks about it http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleArchive/nov2006 /zimbramicrosoft.php

Re:Oh, come on

[pedantic bore]

There's like, 0 different links or names in your post trying to tell us who are the leaders of the pack...

Not that I necessarily doubt that you're correct, but don't leave us hanging like this. Links, please!

Re:Oh, come on

[Bert64]

Could it just be that Novell found themselves with two projects aiming to achieve the same goal, and figured the suse one was better to concentrate their development effort on?

Re:Oh, come on

[AmigaBen]

NO!! It can't be! You seem to forget, Novell is now Evil. Nevermind the fact that most of the people popping up to claim these things STILL don't really know what Hula is, and are just going off the misleading discription written in the blurb. To call it an Exchange replacement is pretty misleading, and frankly inflamatory.

Re:Oh, come on

[hey!]

Theres like, 5 different projects trying to achieve the Holy Grail of replacing Exchange. And Hula was far from the leader of the pack.

Arthur had more than five knights engaged in the Grail quest; most of them failed.

The question is how many developers could be put on the problem. If you have more than will fit into N projects, creating an N+1th project is the most efficient way of harnessing that interest.

Re:Oh, come on

[stu42j]

No, actually Novell dumped SuSE OpenExchange some time ago. SuSE didn't actually develop it. They just licensed it from a company called Netline. Novell didn't continue the license so Netline now sells it themselves.

http://www.open-xchange.com/EN/

That just leaves Novell with GroupWise which is not Open Source. Does run on Linux though.

My boss the "Mac" Guy....

[zerofoo]

I was just explaining to my boss why we have so much Microsoft stuff on our network....a big reason was exchange - it requires active directory, and if you're going to invest in AD, you might as well deploy other things that use AD.

Oh yeah, our accountants and state auditors require that we use Quickbooks enterprise edition as well.

If it wasn't for these two things, we'd be a Mac and Linux shop entirely.

-ted

Could it be possible?

[the Gray Mouser]

That Novell simply got tired of throwing money into a project with no hope of any return on investment?

Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[roca]

Exchange is an expensive disaster. Attempting to replace it with something equivalent that's open-source is a waste of time. The genuinely attractive alternative is Google Apps For Your Domain, i.e., GMail (and GCalendar) for your company. Instead of spending lots of energy and money on IT staff and infrastructure and getting crappy results, Google gives you a better product for free. Who's going to say no?

"People want to control their data", I hear you say. Actually many companies already outsource this stuff, and more would if it was free and the service was great.

"Disgruntled Google employee could steal my data", I hear you say. Hello, your OWN disgruntled employees can already do so, and are probably more likely to.

"GMail doesn't guarantee uptime", I hear you say. Google's already more reliable than than 99% of IT departments. I'm sure they'd be willing to take a little of your money in exchange for a contract that says so.

"Don't want ads", I hear you say. I'm sure Google would take a little more of your money to make them go away. Thanks to their economies of scale, they can charge far less than the cost of in-house email and still make ridiculous profits.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[roca]

Oh, I also hear you say "even so, conservative IT departments won't go for this". Probably so. It's a disruptive play that will start with small companies and gradually work up the food chain.

The good news is that every organization using GAFYD instead of Outlook/Exchange will find it that much easier to switch away from Windows in the desktop.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[BroadbandBradley]

the google calendar for your domain is nice, but the email integration is missing a few things that would put it on par with an exchange server. distribution lists and permissions as to who can send to what, and a few other items of polish would do the trick.
I wish google supported syncml so I could add an appointment on my cell phone and have it sync up to my google calendar, but so far you can't do that.

I agree that it makes sense for a company to just grab a web based solution though, naturally cross platform and not vendor specific (except for dumb-ass activeX BS websites)

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[arkhan_jg]

You missed one - bandwidth. Some of us out in the sticks have to pay a lot of money for high speed access; we've got 2MB SDSL atm, and can't afford faster. It's already saturated with our number of users, and you want me to put one of our most heavily used apps on the outside of it?

Google apps for my domain on a box in my server cabinet? Then we'd be talking.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[RAMMS EIN]

``The good news is that every organization using GAFYD instead of Outlook/Exchange will find it that much easier to switch away from Windows in the desktop.''

Many small companies already aren't using Windows anymore. Some of them never have.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[AVonGauss]

Nobody else has mentioned this yet, but does everybody really want to put their e-mail on somebody else's web server? Personal e-mail is one thing, but considering most companies run a fair amount of their daily operations by e-mail, do you really want your companies internals stored online by another company? Not to mention customer confidentiality and liability concerns depending on your type of business (example: medical).

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[AVonGauss]

Actually, I was thinking something a little more grounded... HP, or more specifically competitors using investigators, etc...

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[roca]

Bandwidth will certainly be a problem for some users in the immediate future, but it'll get inexorably better over time.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[roca]

I mentioned this. Lots of companies already outsource their IT operations, including email.

You wouldn't want to put medical records into GMail, but I don't think you should be sending medical records by email at all.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[roca]

Oh, also, as the spam-to-real-email ratio increases, having the spam filtered Google-side could actually be saving you bandwidth.

Re:Google beats Hula (and Exchange)

[Whitemice]

I mentioned this. Lots of companies already outsource their IT operations, including email.
 
You wouldn't want to put medical records into GMail, but I don't think you should be sending medical records by email at all.But I'll bet almost every on of them:
(a) has their stuff in their own VM (at least) if not their own colocated physical box
(b) they have access to that box if they want it
(c) they have the backups (or at least access to them)

Gmail provides none of the above. (c) being absolutely critical - you are ***NUTS*** - if you use any system for business that you don't have at least rotating backups of. Otherwise just wait till the auditors, or worse - the cops -, come to you with some questions.... and you don't have the information. That makes for a really nice day.

I dump my hope for a usable oss groupware

[jc-denton3]

I tried a lot of oss groupwares (or more precise wasted time with it). Most of them are buggy, they have lot's of usability issues, are complicated to setup etc..

I'm not sure if Novell also sells a proprietary groupware, but in this case this step would be just logical. Why should they support an open source project that can affect the sales on their proprietary product. Hopefully google will release gmail and google calendar for business (eg pay, but get it w/o advertisement and for your domain). This would be cool, since the usability of both projects is great and you would not have to care about configuring clients, setting up software etc..

Re:a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumpe

[HiThere]

...fool me three times - that's enemy action.I think you got that part right. I stopped considering them reliable quite some while ago, though, and missed getting burned through trusting them. It was happenstance, and good fortune rather than good sense, but I wasn't ever that please by SuSE, and didn't like SUSE. (I bought a copy of 9.1 because I liked something that they had done, and wanted to support them, but it didn't stay installed very long.)

It's interesting, because I have 5 different partitions each with a different copy of Linux installed, but the only "commercial" ones are the two Ubuntu partitions, and I spend most of my time in Debian Etch. This isn't because I haven't tried lots of distributions...I could see 10 different boxed versions before I cleaned off my shelves earlier this year, but they aren't the ones I stayed with.

I have a suspicion that companies are basically untrustworthy. Red Hat will probably remain (relatively) trustworthy just a long as Bob Young remains in control. Ubuntu as long as Shuttleworth stays in charge. So the only answer is to have a strong license. GPL3 may suffice. Something that means that we WILL continue to be able to fork the code base, as it's only by frequent forks that FOSS can remain viable, and companies be prevented from being obnoxiously predatory.

No Surprise

[Kurt Wall]

They've gotten their orders from Microsoft — don't compete with MS Exchange. I guess for $400 million , give or take, Novell will do what they are told to do.

Must everything be a war?

[TheChromaticOrb]

We need to build a viable Exchange killer: a open, free (as in speech) alternative for IT managers who would choose Exchange

No. We need a viable free software alternative to proprietary collaboration suites (not just MS Exchange).

Re:a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumpe

[VGPowerlord]

You misquoted it! It's
"Fool me once
Shame on... shame on you.
If you fool me,
you can't get fooled again."

Novell, pillar of truth

[Dracos]

The MS deal was done to promote interoperability. Yeah, right.

Novell says the money they are getting from MS as a result of that deal will go towards more OSS developers. Yeah, right.

Let's make it official. I'm calling shenanigans on Novell. Who's with me?

brilliant advice

[Crispy Critters]

"then take them to court. put up or shut up already."

That is just brilliant. Who ever would have thought of it? If I don't like something being done by a company that can spend $10B on lawyers and not even notice it's gone, I should go to court on my own dime and sue them.

I am sure that with all the free legal advice I can get on the internet I should have no trouble mopping the floor with them. As long as my heart is pure, I will prevail.

What a fucking surprise

[bogie]

If I a nickel for every OSS groupware project that was supposed to be "the" Exchange replacement but then simply died off I'd be a rich man. How disappointing.

Makes sense

[shorty114]

Now that Novell is one of Microsoft's lapdogs, they aren't going to support something that could make Microsoft a little less richer...

This is NORMAL

[dentar]

... Well, for Novell, anyway. Novell has a big history of buying, then dumping, things. I used to be a Novell fanboy but an now recuperating.

what does this mean?

[wardk]

does the deal with MS preclude the community at large from picking this up?

No need for Hula. Try Citadel instead.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Much of what Novell was promising for Hula was ideas that have been either implemented or planned in the Citadel project [http://www.citadel.org] anyway. (We pitched Citadel to them about six months before the Hula announcement ... and they said they weren't interested, and then they announced their project. Draw your own conclusions.)

Anyway, do try Citadel -- it is a very well-integrated collaboration server with an ajax-style web user interface, built-in data stores, lightweight implementations of all relevant protocols (POP, IMAP, SMTP, etc.) ... very easy to install, and just a joy to use.

Efficiency Prevails?

[Whitemice]

This is a good thing; there are at least several viable Open Source Exchange replacements. Hula offered nothing new, and the developers attitudes about groupware (and how it relates to college students getting laid) was just silly. Effort would have been better spent on existing already viable solutions (http://www.opengroupware.org and friends).

Re:Zimbra? - also Scalix, PostPath

[toby]

• Scalix
• PostPath

Down and Out in Provo, Utah

[Doc Ruby]

Too bad Novell didn't prioritize the development of the MS Exchange network APIs first. By now the protocol implementation should have been done. So Outlook and the rest of MS Office, as well as other Exchange servers in clusters, and Active Directory, all could have connected to a Hula shell as if connecting to a real Exchange server. That's the key competitive feature best done by an org like Novell. Which, as OSS, the rest of the community could use for our own apps.

Which we could still use now, even though Hula itself is dead.

It really looks now like Novell doesn't get "open source", and never did. Its management understood that it was the new buzzword, the only way to compete with Microsoft, somehow. So they bought a Linux distro (SuSE), and a desktop (Ximian), and announced a groupware (Hula). But they never really opened their projects, and left the source open mainly as a way to keep developers interested in developing for the "Novell" brand, long after there was any other reason left.

Meanwhile, SCO's lawsuits showed the power of open source, both threatening markets and defending from patent suits, as part of an organized effort by the global developer public. Even a way to work with a competitor like IBM without directly coordinating, just keeping the open content out in the public.

But they learned nothing about open source, its community, its culture, it's true value. They learned only that Microsoft so fears Linux that it will pay huge money for cross-licensing a single Linux run by a clueless, decrepit old competitor MS has already beaten every time, for 20 years. So MS can just crush it last, after MS has used Novell to attack Linux.

I really don't care about Novell. Their Directory Server will be a loss, but the LDAP servers will improve when they have to serve its demanding market. SuSE's SW and ecosystem will convert to other Linux distros, probably mostly Ubuntu. Ximian will be replaced by other GNOME developers, or just a different brand on the same team members.

And Hula will sink into the sunset, an empty promise by a senile old sellout. I just wish we could pick its bones clean for the next competitor to Exchange, without the Novell execs of limited vision getting in the way.

Re:Down and Out in Provo, Utah

[Doc Ruby]

PostPath is not GPL. So it's about as useful to the open source community as is MS Exchange.

Hula hoop v2 ?

[Mathness]

*confused expression*

What is wrong with the hula hoop? And why run a computer on it?

Crazy case modders, I tell you. Now get off my lawn.

Active directory is what we need

[bluefoxlucid]

We really need a full active directory replacement. LDAP + KRB5 integrated compatible with Windows, with a schema compatible with Windows 2003 Server or such, and a management console that doesn't involve writing up text files and then using some command line tool to parse them.

Re:Active directory is what we need

[lowlands]

Have a look at the Red Hat Directory Server http://www.redhat.com/solutions/directoryserver/ which is a commercial offering or the Fedora Directory Server http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/ which is free. This is the offspring of the former Sun/iPlanet Directory Server and way up on the enterprise-grade scale and includes a java based management console.

Re:Active directory is what we need

[bluefoxlucid]

Why do I never see this packaged with my distro.. (Ubuntu) Is it even packaged in Fedora? O_o

Re:Active directory is what we need

[Whitemice]

>>We really need a full active directory replacement. LDAP + KRB5 integrated
>>compatible with Windows, with a schema compatible with Windows 2003 Server
>>or such, and a management console that doesn't involve writing up text
>>files and then using some command line tool to parse them.

Agree; this is what Samba 4 will be. It is nothing resembling easy.

> Have you heard of Apple Computer? They make something along these lines.

No they don't. A Mac can participate in an AD domain, it can't master one. Anything (BSD, Mac, Linux, etc...) reasonably recent can participate in an AD domain. But even then only partially, they don't respect user policies, etc... or all the other niceities .

Ping...

[IANAAC]

You should check your ping times.

Now I know...

[Eric Damron]

I had wondered what Microsoft was getting for its 384 million bucks. Now I wonder how many more OSS projects Novell will dump. Just the ones that provide competition to Microsoft's cash cows perhaps?

Why would they compete with Groupwise

[daveb]

Yeah sure the MS deal is too fresh to be coincidence.

But I'm wondering why Novell was going for it at all. Their proprietary system GroupWise is extremely stable and scalable (unless your admin's are monkeys) and makes exchange look sick unless you are talking about things like umm - you know - FEATURES and other fluff. But honestly - it ain't bad.

Why would they champion an OOS alternative to their own product?

But then - I can't say I really understand why they would champion Linux over Netware, unless they are acknowledging they've lost the OS battle and want to concentrate on selling the service and application layer/ring.

I guess they were really buying into the whole OOS thing. Well - up until some manager started to wonder what exactly is left to sell.

Re:Why would they compete with Groupwise

[daveb]

really? I haven't seen that recommendation but I take your word for it. We use it for all our students but we're a small college - well we think we're big but we are small by USA standards.

I hear rumors we're going down the MS track because new senior management likes the fluff they had in other places. Our email admin is NOT happy.

Exchange alternatives too "boring" to work on?

[javacowboy]

I'm not trolling. Please hear me out.

First of all, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Hula died not because of Microsoft. I know the jury's still out as to whether Microsoft had the project killed, but please bear with me.

Is it possible that open-source projects aimed at emulating Exchange functionality fail because of lack of developer interest?

Think about it. Open-source projects are fun for developers because they get to do help write new and exciting programs that they actually use. Keeping this in mind, is it possible that working on an Exchange competitor is simply too boring, too mundane, and too mechanical to interest l337 h8X0R5?

I'm betting that Exchange succeeded because Microsoft was paying to pay good developers lots of money to work on Exchange. This was probably a project that was really boring, mundane and mechanical work they would have absolutely never done had they not been paid generously for it.

Re:Exchange alternatives too "boring" to work on?

[octopus72]

I also believe this is a reason why open source servers aren't being as rapidly developed as fast as desktop currently is. It is boring and unrewarding. Something not hard but requires much work to copy the bloat like Exchange. And You won't use it as a hobbyst, corporations will (without even saying thanks for it). Unfortunately this same work is crucial for adoption of Linux because linux environments can't penetrate small businesses until a reasonably good and Office/Outlook/AD-comatible software stack is available and standardly available in most distros (that's right, just one or two such suites have power to survive and become mainstream). While Samba are doing good work at windows protocol descrambling and AD and SMB interoperability, it is only part of the equation of providing alternatives to MS stack.

I've used both Exchange and gmail ...

[mikefocke]

and Gmail (to me) lacks the ease of use and the documentation that Exchange offers.

I used Exchange and Outlook in a more complex environment for many years and was the first in my company to use them and to test new features as they came out. I shared calenders with 1000 people and had both corporate and private address books, the private consisting of perhaps 100 people in other corporations and 100 personals. Their reliability was outstanding. Some praise goes to the IT department and finance types as we were never wanting for the right hardware or software or monitoring.

I've use Gmail since it was publicly available in a home environment with perhaps 200 contacts.

A simple Gmail thing like wanting to forward a message to 2 recipients becomes a cut and paste exercise. Gcal is rudimentary. And there has been precious little new feature adds to get it to a more usable state. It is reliable and it works, it is just so much more work to maintain your contacts and to interplay between contacts, email and calender, things I took for granted in Exchange/Outlook.

Its functionality like this from its apps that Linux needs to support corporate use. Linux is wonderful for software development and for many server side tasks, but if it wants to penetrate corporations for all tasks, somehow it has to offer equivalent functionality. And Gmail, in its present state, just isn't it.

Now tell me why Gmail was brought out and then abandoned? Can I trust Google ... because I don't see signs of long term commitment to the betterment and support of the Gmail product ... something I look for in a supplier. I see Google not learning from what Microsoft showed us works, bring it out, learn from feedback and keep working at it until by rev 3 or 4 it really works right.

Goggle ... where is rev 3?

IMHO, YMMV

Re:I've used both Exchange and gmail ...

[roca]

GMail has not been abandoned. They added some new features just recently, like live update of conversation threads when new mail arrives while you're reading a conversation.

Certainly some companies are lucky enough to have the right combination of IT staff and organizational commitment to make Exchange work well. But as far as I can tell, most don't, and even for those that do, it's very expensive.

Re:Boycotting Novell is the best form of protest

[Oliver Defacszio]

The only language Novell understands is the language of money.

Yeah! Those assholes! You'd think they're trying to run a business or something.

Re:Gaius Baltar, pillar of truth

[WilliamSChips]

The Cylon "deal" with New Caprica was done to promote "interoperability" too.

while im not for nor against....

[pjr.cc]

Im still trying to decide whether the novell/ms deal was a good thing, but I realy find it hard to believe hula got canned becuase of it.

Every second post seems to be a novell post and how "their descision to do x" is soley based on their new "partnership". If MS really are at the helm then im really not sure it matters alot, It makes suse look more attractive to corporates but there are plenty of options out there that dont involve selling your soul to the devil.

I remember a post a while ago about ways Microsoft could harm linux, i wish i could find the link but it talked about things like "encorage forking within linux" or words to that effect. It'll be interesting to see if just the mere smell of MS on Novell will be enough to create a scism that'll result in some form of forking here...

Re:I represent the coalition against stupid posts

[AVonGauss]

How about first representing yourself and not posting as an anonymous coward? ;)

I mildy loathe Microsoft...

[AmazingRuss]

...but I have a special burning hatred for exchange server. I've been burned by it in so many ways, I wince at the very mention of it. I've gone so far as to drop clients who demanded I install it.

Re:Maui

[swerk]

I don't think there's going to be a Maui. I haven't heard what Novell's story is for NetMail customers, either. For some of them, Hula will probably work, I'm not sure what state the migration/upgrade tools were left in though.

Novell is the new sendo

[symbolset]

http://tinyurl.com/yhz8az/

Novell needed to do some due diligence before they entered this deal. So sad. Where will all their engineers go?

Novell Groupwise

[euice]

One of Novell's larger products is Groupwise, a full MsExchange/Outlook competitor. With that in mind, I always have been sceptical on how far that support for the hula project will last...

Re: continued work

[swerk]

My excuses aren't great; basically I've had very little time for programming outside of work. I do hope to still contribute when time permits. As for the bits I was hacking on, the loosest ends got tied up, and some polish was actually put on by other team members. But yes, I do hope to go in and clean up some things I left messy. I wish I could do so on company time, but I consider myself lucky to have been paid to work on Hula while it was going strong. I still frequent #hula on GimpNet (as penduin), though I haven't had much to say lately.

Re: Hula or the Microsoft deal??

[swerk]

I assume you're joking, but for the sake of anyone who's genuinely confused (I do tend to phrase things poorly, after all) I was speaking of Hula.

I daren't say anything about the Microsoft deal, because I don't have sufficient information yet. The real consequences of that deal will shake out over the next few years. Many a short-term "good deal" becomes a long-term "what-the-crap-were-we-thinking", but I'm not convinced that Novell's "deal with the devil" will turn out that way. Nor am I convinced it won't. In the meantime, I've got code to write and checks to take home, so it's hard to be too unhappy.

Re:serious issues with exchange server

[gujo-odori]

I work for Microsoft too, for a little while longer, anyway (I'm resigning to pursue other opportunities) and have worked on Exchange. The criticisms people have of Exchange are pretty well founded. E2K7 is a ground-up 64-bit rewrite. Draw your own conclusions as to why.

Why do people use Exchange despite its problems with the Exchange database, trampling on SMTP standards, security holes, etc.?

Because as kludgy as Exchange may be, the set of functions it provides together with Outlook are something business find very valuable. There are three main groupware servers in the market: Exchange, Groupwise, and Domino. I'm not going to speculate on which of those three may be the best on technical merit, but the marketplace has generally chosen Exchange over the others.

Why has no FOSS alternative to Exchange ever gained any traction? Well, for one thing we have a very large installed base and trying to get companies with a large and complex infrastructure to rip it out and replace it with something else is hard as long as what they have is working. Even if the something else is both better and cheaper, getting them to make the switch is hard. If that something else is not better and cheaper, it's impossible. And from the standpoint of businesses where everyone is using Outlook, putting in an open source Exchange replacement, unless Outlook clients could talk to it natively without any extra plug-ins, does not meet the definition of "better."

Exchange is big. It's complex. It has a huge amount of code in it. Making a true FOSS drop-in Exchange replacement would be very difficult. You can duplicate the functionality pretty well, and many FOSS projects have (Kolab might be the best of those, and it's also very complex, and maintains it's own internal RPM database of its components, which I find just ugly), but AFAIK none of them is really a drop-in replacement for Exchange. If anyone could really make one, it might get adopted widely for its cost savings, but I'm not holding my breath. The alternatives out there are good enough to use in a business that does not yet have a groupware server and is setting one up, but not good enough to drive out Exchange where it's already established

Meanwhile, Exchange 2007 is a real improvement over previous versions. Faster. More secure. Exchange Edge is aimed straight at shops that are all Exchange except for Sendmail or other *nix-based servers on the network edge. We've raised the bar for how how much any FOSS Exchange replacement has to achieve to displace Exchange.

not a troll

[drDugan]

I started this thread and parent is not a troll. Exchange really is a great product, but also bloated and closed, both source and standards.

Getting the open source folks organized to really provide an alternative will be a HUGE task.

actually, that would be SLED10. . .

[alizard]

SLES is the server.

BTW, anybody noticed that NOTHING has hit the press about Novell with respect to the rather nice, if overhyped SLED10 "Vista-killer" since the announcement that Novell got pwn3d by MS?

Microsoft Patsies

[amavida]

What else can you expect from them but embrace, extend & extinguish...

It's not a coincidence that they sign up with the Linux is full of M$ IP bullshit & then start killing off direct competitors to M$.

A sad day for SuSE, Linux & for freedom in general.
Big business OWNS you in the USA.

Re:I represent the coalition against stupid posts

[grolschie]

You are....<niceties deleted>

Someone with no sense of humour? Or perhaps AC got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

Get a grip. It doesn't matter.

[msobkow]

Calendaring. Address book. Email.

MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, and a long, long list of other products and projects that can provide the server functionality to front-end clients.

The only people who are really crying about it are those looking for a free drop-in replacement for MS Exchange license fees. There is nothing special about the functionality of Exchange.

Hanover

[Kadin2048]

Hanover is supposed to run on Linux, by virtue (I think) of being Java-based. I've played around with a new version of Sametime that's cross-platform and (allegedly) built the same way, and it doesn't "feel" like a Java app (i.e. suck horribly); if Hanover is like this, it'll be a big step forward for Notes in general and groupware on Linux as a whole, at least for Notes shops like ours.

I'm not sure when Hanover is supposed to actually come out, but it's becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of the groupware world...

Intelligent Design?

[CustomDesigned]

So you're suggesting that event B is likely to have been a deliberate choice made by an intelligence, and not the normal result of business ebb and flow? I'm sorry, but on slashdot, we don't believe in ID. (Or was that only ID from certain intelligences?)

BTW, you gave evidence of the complexity (probability) of the juxtaposition of events. To suggest ID, you need to also show significance - i.e. specified according to predetermined criterion. Otherwise, you are "cherry picking" or painting the bullseye around the arrow. To reliably recognize intelligence requires an interactive process. Significance is difficult to judge after the fact, but it can be done. In the case of Novell, the "prior" criterion is "competition with Microsoft". I would like to know what projects Novell has been starting and defunding all along before deciding that event B is unusual. Businesses do that all the time. But if defunding MS competition is suddenly a larger proportion, that would be suspicious.

Re:Boycotting Novell is the best form of protest

[pallmall1]

You'd think they're trying to run a business or something.

So were plantation owners in the Old South. And they also had slaves in the house who thought the system was just fine.

Whose house do you live in?

Re:No need for Hula. Try Citadel instead.

[Macka]

No support for Mac OS X client apps then?

This is a loss

[horza]

Hula was a great solution for those of us sick of configuring and reconfiguring Postfix/Sendmail/Courier/etc. Hula takes minutes to install, and a few clicks to add users and domains. It provided everything out of the box. I am really disappointed and was really looking forward to Hula with complete CalDav and re-enabled graphical admin. I don't really want the mish-mash of apps combined into expensive 'solutions' such as Zimbra. I guess it's time to dust off the HOW-TOs and feel the pain again.

Phillip.

Sametime

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Trust me on this... Sametime sucks horribly in all it's incarnations. Do yourself a favour, use Jabber.

Re:No need for Hula. Try Citadel instead.

[mcbridematt]

I've been the lonely person in the corner at the Citadel using OS X :(

Support for iCal and its webdav protocol is there, and CalDAV is on the cards. I'll probably bring out the iCal-GroupDAV sync'er I wrote long ago in the near future and present that as a solution in the interim.

Google our next hope?

[mythz]

I've seen so many opensource products become a victim of the original Mozilla philosophy by trying to do too much. If we have learned anything from the popularity of Firefox its that people want software that is easy to use and works well for its main purpose. Why can't we just focus on implementing the features that will satisfy most people i.e. a solid integrated mail and calendaring solution.

We'll anyway it hasn't been mentioned but I think Google is the only one that gets it these days, they make isolated products that work extremely well, then after they are solid products they work on integrating them. Gmail, Google Calendar and Google docs & spreadsheets is actually pretty well integrated and also work great as stand alone products. As an example if google sees a date in your email one of the functions available is to add this event to your calendar with one click. Likewise if someone sends you a word or excel document you have the option to view or edit it online. Apart from being convenient it is also the quickest way to view a word or excel document in an email and whats even better is that you can do all this without Word or Excel which is pretty much a first. It also has the benefit or being accessible anywhere and on any device that has a browser and an Internet connection. You also get built in IM with Gmail. I actually prefer it to Outlook/Exchange. There are still a few features that are missing for it to be an option in the enterprise but I believe that a lot of small businesses will see the value and eventually standardize on google products.

The main problem is that Google's products are not opensource so we are still at the mercy of a corporation. Though the Google way is a good example how to build a successfull competitive solution even up against the MS Network monopoly.

Re:Google our next hope?

[petrus4]

I've seen so many opensource products become a victim of the original Mozilla philosophy by trying to do too much.

Quote from Doug McIlroy, one of the men involved in the early development of UNIX:-
"Do one thing well."

You might want to read The Art of UNIX Programming. After having read it, I suspect you'll realise that, just as (to quote the saying) GNU's not UNIX, Linux actually isn't either. I wouldn't know how many Linux related projects I've seen which totally violate the early UNIX philosophy...rpm is probably the single most egregious example, but there are others. Ports is the only package management system I've seen which (are we surprised?) doesn't violate that philosophy...and it doesn't because it consists of a *group* of small processes working together, rather than one big opaque, monolithic mess as in the case of rpm.

If Firefox was truly old school in terms of its' development model, a number of things would be true about it that are not true now:-

• It would be a web browser. NOTHING ELSE.
  
• The core HTML renderer would be released as a CLI program, and GUI front-ends for it would either be developed by a seperate group within the same project, or by someone else entirely. Said engine/GUI pair would communicate via sockets or something similar...in other words, a clean, transparent protocol. This would also mean that there could be multiple GUIs for it if necessary.
  Programs used to be developed this way in the early days of Linux...I'm assuming that has only stopped because of the vast influx of Windows refugees who've managed to infect Linux people with Microsoft's broken programming methodology. Monoculture is NOT a good thing...the only people who want it are again, the Windows refugees...and they only want it because it's all they know...not because they've actually thought about it.
  
• Firefox would have a genuinely sane compilation routine, not the convoluted mess they've got now. The system is not designed to allow other people to be able to compile it easily...it's designed primarily to be compiled within the project by people already intimate with it, with precompiled binaries being the only thing used by the outside world.
  
• The Firefox developers wouldn't be such abusive, bad tempered, elitist assholes. Contrary to popular belief, early UNIX development wasn't associated with the kind of elitism, self-righteousness, and relentless vitriol that has customarily sprung up since. It was developed communally, without "community" being the four letter word that Richard Stallman is primarily responsible for turning it into. I've mentioned the LFS project before...Go and sit on irc.linuxfromscratch.org for a while and observe how the people there relate to each other. It's very positive and laid back, for the most part.

Zimbra

[backwardMechanic]

I'm not trying to troll, but what kind of open source project is Zimbra? A quick look over the editions page (http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.h tml) makes me think the OS edition is missing some basic features (e.g. outlook sync). Am I missing something?

Re:Zimbra

[tenchiken]

Zimbra has a pretty good OS edition, which integrates in pretty well with Exchange. If you want to use Outlook instead, you can get the professional edition which has some added functionality, but it's not as if the OS version is crippled.

This is in line with usual practices. I don't think I have seen a free Outlook Sync yet anywhere.

Re:Zimbra

[backwardMechanic]

Thanks for the info. My university have just moved over to Outlook (for the added security, they say), so I'm stuck with webmail from my Linux box.

Re:Zimbra

[nine-times]

They don't offer support for POP/IMAP? What about Evolution?

Re:Zimbra

[backwardMechanic]

Our IT people have decided not to offer IMAP or POP. Who knows why - they really don't understand why we won't all just use Office under Windows and stop running this complicated science stuff. The same team that wipe 64bit windows to replace it with the 32bit version, because they don't want to buy a license for the 64bit version of the virus scanner.

Sorry, our IT folks make me rant. I'll look up evolution, thanks for the tip.

Re:Zimbra

[nine-times]

I say rant away. Your IT team sounds retarded if they won't enable IMAP/SMTP.

Groupwise?

[shaneh0]

Does anyone know how/if this was related to their GroupWise product?

GroupWise is far from Exchange in nearly every possible measure, and the client makes one long for Outlook, but if nothing else I'd think it would be a good start. While I've never worked on an enterprise-class client/server email/communication suite, I imagine that it's icebergian in that most of the code is not user-facing.

Open Source GroupWise and "part it out" if nothing else.

Re:Groupwise?

[justinchudgar]

Does anyone know how/if this was related to their GroupWise product? GroupWise is far from Exchange in nearly every possible measure, and the client makes one long for Outlook,

Back in the late 90's I really pushed GroupWise over Exchange; mostly losing that debate as the NT/Win2K tide swept through the corporate IT landscape. Now, after administering Exchange in dozens of installations, from my 2 user home LAN to ~1000 PC organizations, I'm back in an environment where the transition from GroupWise to Exchange has yet to happen.

Man, does GroupWise SUCK!!! I'm there working on application deployment automation, so my experience with the collaboration server is strictly as an end user. From that perspective, it is clear that Novell made very limited, incremental progress in the last 5-6 years while MS turned Exchange into a dramatically better product.

I'd hope that open sourcing GroupWise would allow the development of GW to accelerate from the efforts of the community to the point where it was really competitive on a user-facing and administrator-facing basis with Exchange. I am admittedly new to *NIX, coming into IT via NetWare and then moving to Windows, but, I'd really like to see a open-source variant of the Windows Small Business Server (SBS) package. Something for really small businesses that gives groupware, authentication, file/print, web/application, database servers in a "Just install from the CD" way.

I know that there are OSS alternatives for all of these things. I'm pretty sure that the Debian or Ubuntu "server" installs include all of these things already. But, the one thing that SBS offers is a generally useable default configuration out of the box. 8 hours setup work and a small business network can be running with all of the SBS features working.

I'd like to see an equally simple alternetive in the OSS world. If anyone knows of one, I'll test it out as soon as I can.

Re:Hula - Zimbra

[iamcadaver]

I liked the ease of setup for Hula, but I have since stacked so many other implementations on top of it that it isn't recognizable as Hula, expect the SMTP greeting.

I tried installing Zimbra but was appalled that it was installing parallel it's own versions of everything already included in the distribution.

Even then, I didn't find any clean way of exporting my years worth of email out of Hula.

So, as having made the transition, can you help me out with a link or two as to how to migrate email stores from Hula -> Zimbra? I still believe in Zimbra's vision: intelligent software that helps but doesn't get in the way.

Re:Hula - Zimbra

[tenchiken]

Check out the wiki, it has loads of details on how to do this. In particular check out Imapsync. Works like a charm.

As for the "parrallel copy of everything" that's because Zimbra uses each of thoose components as part of it's stack. They have optimized versions of each of thoose platforms to provide functionality and allow a easier install.Given that Zimbra generates their config files via variable substitution the install proccess would be feasable but very ugly otherwise.

Karma

[symbolset]

http://www.komotv.com/news/local/4687431.html

Like a hand from the sky...

Novell sold out?

[Alphager]

You mean the fact Novell is a partner with the Hula-alternative Scalix?

Most regulatory issues forbid offsite email

[charnov]

That would be a huge legal mess in the US for far too many reasons. A company has to either have a very specific and bonded contract (I worked at a not too large financial services company that asked for a $100 million bond for document storage from an offsite company to cover accidental disclosure liability) or they have to own the servers and keep them on premises. This applies to anyone who has an HR department, payroll, accounting, works with the SEC or NASD, deals with anything patient record related, etc...so basically banking, insurance, medicine, financial services, law, and all ancillary industries would be precluded from using this service.

Also, no manager would ever sign off on offsiting critical documents (a service companies lifeblood) for anything but backup or disaster recovery AKA business continuity.

Are backups fixed in 2007?

[bill_mcgonigle]

it's an excellent product

Do you still have to choose between backing up all your data twice or doing restores on a separate server?

Re:Are backups fixed in 2007?

[alienw]

I am not an IT admin, I just use it on a daily basis. I honestly don't give a shit how difficult it is to keep it running, it's not my job, and it's something for the director of IT to figure out. It works well enough from my end.

Re:Right and wrong

[octopus72]

I believe this problem be dramatically changed when documentation that MS had to surrender to EU authorities lands in hands of open source developers. This is expected to happen very soon.

Re:Right and wrong

[drsmithy]

There IS plenty of demand for something that does what Exchange does. However, there's no demand for something that does what exchange does but doesn't work with Exchange.

Yes, there is. For example, any shop that isn't already committed to Exchange has demand for something that does what Exchange does, but isn't Exchange. Any shop dissatisfied with Exchange's performance, also, is interested in something that does what Exchange does that isn't Exchange.

People like you need to stop making excuses. There is heaps of demand for the high-level functionality Exchange provides. However, there is a dearth of software providing it. No-one is going to stop (or not start) using Exchange when there's nothing else to fill the niche.

There are many, many ways of solving the problem but getting it to work with MS protocols isn't easy.

It doesn't need to work with "MS protocols" any more than any other client/server application does to be successful on Windows. Or are you suggesting it's impossible to build an integrated client/server package on top of Windows ?

Re:a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumpe

[Fox_1]

Funny, but I don't quote Bush, god forbid my words should ever echo his, even unconsciously. No that was a translation of the original Chinese proverb with a logical(if paranoid) conclusion tacked onto the end.

Re:a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumpe

[VGPowerlord]

I was just using it as an excuse to link to Bush looking stupid.

Re:a $ for every OpenSource project Novell's dumpe

[Fox_1]

who needs the excuse :)
but here's a little enemy action,
linking Bush and Novell
grab the tin foil hats and lets conspiracy theorize.