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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."
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?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Why do I detect the feeling of salt poured into an open wound?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with that decision?
I am officially gone from
An open source project dying a quiet, pathetic death in lieu of things that might actually generate revenue?
NOW I've seen everything.
Didn't Zimbra beat them to the punch anyway?
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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
Bruce Perens.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
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.
You should check your ping times.