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.
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.
Novell has not provided any useful precedent or other legal ammunition that ANYONE can use in ANY court case. We didn't acknowledge that there are any MS patents infringed by Linux. So this court case you're screaming about is totally unaffected by the Novell/MS deal. Microsoft has been spreading FUD that Linux infringes MS IP for years -- nothing changed in that respect here.
Another point I want to make. Open Source Risk Management is a company that makes its money by selling insurance on Linux IP infringement. So if you're worried that Linux infringes someone's IP, you buy their products. Two years ago OSRM went off and funded a study by Dan Ravicher -- whose PubPat is in my view a great organization -- that looked at Linux to determine whether it actually violates anyone's software patents. Then in August of 2004 (a few months after Bruce Perens joined their board, I might add), OSRM published a study stating that Linux infringes 283 patents, 27 from Microsoft. You can read about it here: http://news.com.com/Group+Linux+potentially+infrin ges+283+patents/2100-7344_3-5291403.html
Here is a company that sells Linux IP insurance and therefore directly benefits financially from people's fear over Linux patent FUD, so they publish these ominous statements about Linux infringing hundreds of patents! This is realy work done by real people to examine specific patents and determine whether Linux infringes them or not.
On the other hand you have Novell who make NO such statement, who directly contradict Microsoft in the press when Ballmer goes off and says things like this.
So pardon me, but I think it's worth looking at the whole picture here.
A few years ago Red Hat introduced their service license which said that if you bought Linux from them, made a copy of it, and put it on another machine, your service contract for the paid machine was canceled. There was a pretty loud reaction to this, and a lot of people in the community said that Red Hat's service agreement was incompatible with GPLv2. Eventually Eben Moglen and the SFLC reviewed Red Hat's service agreement and said "it's on the edge, but it does not violate GPLv2" (or words to that effect).
That seems to be what's happened here too. In Tokyo a few days ago Richard Stallman said:
> What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent licence, > and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. [...]
People keep saying this, but there are counterexamples.
In 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. The deal also involved a promise from Microsoft to make Office available on Macintoshes, and there was a patent agreement as well. Bill Gates appeared on the big screen at MacWorld to jeers and shouts. People said Apple had done a deal with the devil and was dead. But in fact the deal gave Apple the money and the breathing room to build itself up and they are far from dead now (though not the most open company in the world, obviously).
In 2004 Sun did a deal with Microsoft, were paid $1 billion, and signed a patent agreement with MS as well. This month they announced they are GPLing Java.
So while I agree that MS is a dangerous company and you have to be careful when you do anything with them, it's simply not true that doing a deal with them is always fatal.
Yeah, this is a very fair point. You can run separate components of Evolution separately with the -c option, e.g. "evolution -c calendar" gives you only the calendar.
We have considered splitting Evolution into separate projects a number of times, and it may still happen.
Open source hasn't yet succeeded in building a collaboration server that people can actually use in a variety of settings. We want to fill this gap with Hula.
We believe that people mainly just want the basics: mail, calendaring, addressbook, maybe shared documents.
The dominant solutions today -- Exchange and Notes -- are built on a 20-year old design that predates the web. They were intended to be platforms on which you could build tools like expense processing, vacation requests, and other things. This was called "workflow."
Today, those functions are all done on internal web sites. It's just better. Who wants to build on the Exchnage "platform" if they don't have to?
But still companies are stuck with these hopelessly big, complex servers, just to do basic email and calendaring. They are expensive, they are heavyweight. They overdeliver.
So what we want to build with Hula is, in a way, the "Firefox" of collaboration servers. Do the basics, and do them extremely well. Provide an extension system so other people can add things if they want.
Dave Camp is the maintainer of Hula; he has a lot of experience in open source and we think he'll guide the project well. Many of the Novell engineers behind the original code (notably David Smith and Rodney Price) are working on the Hula project and will continue to work on it.
We're serious about making Hula work. Stop by #hula on freenode if you want to meet us.
We're not really sure where the rumor came from that Novell is standardizing on Qt as its desktop platform. Chris Stone said no such thing during his keynote; the video for the keynote is available here:
http://www.novell.com/brainshare/keynotes2004.ht ml
Novell supports GNOME and KDE, Qt and Gtk. We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. First of all, most software developed for the Linux desktop is developed by the broader community, and Novell could never impose a standard platform on the community at large. We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application.
We do not regard the variety of toolkits and platforms in the Linux world as a problem, as long as there are standards and shared code which allow applications to work together.
And frankly, today's Linux toolkits and platforms are one of the least interesting topics on the Linux desktop today. The important issues for this industry and market are our opportunity to innovate in information management and collaboration, improving interoperability with Windows users and services, bringing more ISVs and developers to the Linux platform, enhancing the usability and consistency of the various components that make up the desktop, enabling Windows migration with tools and training and documentation, and creating a manageable Linux desktop to enable large-scale deployments.
We see freedesktop.org as one of the most important and central elements of the Linux desktop for the next several years. The desktop today is made up of a number of components, including OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, and of course GNOME and KDE. Over time we hope to work with freedesktop.org to unify the key interfaces and functionality of these components, to improve integration for users and provide a common open source desktop platform.
Since Novell purchased us 3 months ago, we have increased our investment in all of our products, using Novell's resources. And we've been aggressive about driving open source and Linux throughout the company.
Here's a little evidence, all postdating the acquisition by Novell:
And this is really just the beginning. As you can imagine, most of the super exciting stuff we are doing is behind the scenes.
From time to time since we were acquired three months ago I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name,"...
I think it should be clear that this is ridiculous.
Yes, we will still support KDE on SuSE. However, we hope to use this opportunity to provide Linux developers and ISVs with a single stable platform for desktop application development.
Yes, we will keep the desktop distro free. We will even make things more free than they have been.
We don't have a fundamentally new file selection dialog, but we added some quickbuttons to the stock Gtk one that jump you to your desktop, documents or home directory. This makes it a bit easier to use.
Owen Taylor is allegedly developing a new file manager in Gtk 2.4 that should be much easier to use, and that we expect to see adopted across GNOME very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Hopefully everyone can also see that Big Mike so-to-say ended up getting shaken down by Novell for an awful lot more than they got from Novell.
I guess you're talking about the SCO cases. It's probably worth remembering that Novell have been pretty active in that arena too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM#Novell_en
Novell has not provided any useful precedent or other legal ammunition that ANYONE can use in ANY court case. We didn't acknowledge that there are any MS patents infringed by Linux. So this court case you're screaming about is totally unaffected by the Novell/MS deal. Microsoft has been spreading FUD that Linux infringes MS IP for years -- nothing changed in that respect here.
Another point I want to make. Open Source Risk Management is a company that makes its money by selling insurance on Linux IP infringement. So if you're worried that Linux infringes someone's IP, you buy their products. Two years ago OSRM went off and funded a study by Dan Ravicher -- whose PubPat is in my view a great organization -- that looked at Linux to determine whether it actually violates anyone's software patents. Then in August of 2004 (a few months after Bruce Perens joined their board, I might add), OSRM published a study stating that Linux infringes 283 patents, 27 from Microsoft. You can read about it here:
http://news.com.com/Group+Linux+potentially+infri
Here is a company that sells Linux IP insurance and therefore directly benefits financially from people's fear over Linux patent FUD, so they publish these ominous statements about Linux infringing hundreds of patents! This is realy work done by real people to examine specific patents and determine whether Linux infringes them or not.
On the other hand you have Novell who make NO such statement, who directly contradict Microsoft in the press when Ballmer goes off and says things like this.
So pardon me, but I think it's worth looking at the whole picture here.
A few years ago Red Hat introduced their service license which said that if you bought Linux from them, made a copy of it, and put it on another machine, your service contract for the paid machine was canceled. There was a pretty loud reaction to this, and a lot of people in the community said that Red Hat's service agreement was incompatible with GPLv2. Eventually Eben Moglen and the SFLC reviewed Red Hat's service agreement and said "it's on the edge, but it does not violate GPLv2" (or words to that effect).
That seems to be what's happened here too. In Tokyo a few days ago Richard Stallman said:
> What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent licence,
> and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. [...]
(from http://www.germany.fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/t
This is a pretty clear statement that the letter of GPLv2 is not touched.
(He does go on to say that GPLv3 will include new language.)
People keep saying this, but there are counterexamples.
In 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple. The deal also involved a promise from Microsoft to make Office available on Macintoshes, and there was a patent agreement as well. Bill Gates appeared on the big screen at MacWorld to jeers and shouts. People said Apple had done a deal with the devil and was dead. But in fact the deal gave Apple the money and the breathing room to build itself up and they are far from dead now (though not the most open company in the world, obviously).
In 2004 Sun did a deal with Microsoft, were paid $1 billion, and signed a patent agreement with MS as well. This month they announced they are GPLing Java.
So while I agree that MS is a dangerous company and you have to be careful when you do anything with them, it's simply not true that doing a deal with them is always fatal.
That's "robo secretary". It's an idea for a feature. We couldn't think of what to call it.
See the "robosecretary" part on this page:
http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/Text
Yeah, this is a very fair point. You can run separate components of Evolution separately with the -c option, e.g. "evolution -c calendar" gives you only the calendar.
We have considered splitting Evolution into separate projects a number of times, and it may still happen.
Hula is not abandonware. It is a project we have only started to invest in.
Come by #hula on freenode, count the 20-25 Novell employees there, and then determine for yourself what kind of project it is.
Open source hasn't yet succeeded in building a collaboration server that people can actually use in a variety of settings. We want to fill this gap with Hula.
We believe that people mainly just want the basics: mail, calendaring, addressbook, maybe shared documents.
The dominant solutions today -- Exchange and Notes -- are built on a 20-year old design that predates the web. They were intended to be platforms on which you could build tools like expense processing, vacation requests, and other things. This was called "workflow."
Today, those functions are all done on internal web sites. It's just better. Who wants to build on the Exchnage "platform" if they don't have to?
But still companies are stuck with these hopelessly big, complex servers, just to do basic email and calendaring. They are expensive, they are heavyweight. They overdeliver.
So what we want to build with Hula is, in a way, the "Firefox" of collaboration servers. Do the basics, and do them extremely well. Provide an extension system so other people can add things if they want.
Dave Camp is the maintainer of Hula; he has a lot of experience in open source and we think he'll guide the project well. Many of the Novell engineers behind the original code (notably David Smith and Rodney Price) are working on the Hula project and will continue to work on it.
We're serious about making Hula work. Stop by #hula on freenode if you want to meet us.
You can run the Hula calendar separately from the mailer/MTA. We definitely want to follow the one-problem one-tool rule for people who want that.
We're not really sure where the rumor came from that Novell is standardizing on Qt as its desktop platform. Chris Stone said no such thing during his keynote; the video for the keynote is available here:
http://www.novell.com/brainshare/keynotes2004.h
Novell supports GNOME and KDE, Qt and Gtk. We have not decided that we are standardizing on Qt for the desktop. First of all, most software developed for the Linux desktop is developed by the broader community, and Novell could never impose a standard platform on the community at large. We support development with a variety of toolkits, and our internal development is done using the right tool for the right problem. This includes Qt, Gtk, VCL, XUL and others, depending on the application.
We do not regard the variety of toolkits and platforms in the Linux world as a problem, as long as there are standards and shared code which allow applications to work together.
And frankly, today's Linux toolkits and platforms are one of the least interesting topics on the Linux desktop today. The important issues for this industry and market are our opportunity to innovate in information management and collaboration, improving interoperability with Windows users and services, bringing more ISVs and developers to the Linux platform, enhancing the usability and consistency of the various components that make up the desktop, enabling Windows migration with tools and training and documentation, and creating a manageable Linux desktop to enable large-scale deployments.
We see freedesktop.org as one of the most important and central elements of the Linux desktop for the next several years. The desktop today is made up of a number of components, including OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, and of course GNOME and KDE. Over time we hope to work with freedesktop.org to unify the key interfaces and functionality of these components, to improve integration for users and provide a common open
source desktop platform.
Nat Friedman
Novell/SUSE Linux Desktop Lead
Since Novell purchased us 3 months ago, we have increased our investment in all of our products, using Novell's resources. And we've been aggressive about driving open source and Linux throughout the company.
...
Here's a little evidence, all postdating the acquisition by Novell:
- My notes on our new desktop development center in Bangalore
- An article from the Times of India about our new developers there
- The freshly-published (today!) Mono Roadmap showing where we're going with the development platform
- The first entry in our new Evolution blog, describing the plans for Evolution 2.0, to be released early next year
- The announcement and wiki for the Brooklyn GNOME developer's summit we are sponsoring this month
- The announcement that our Exchange connector now supports Exchange 2003
And this is really just the beginning. As you can imagine, most of the super exciting stuff we are doing is behind the scenes.
From time to time since we were acquired three months ago I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name,"
I think it should be clear that this is ridiculous.
Yes, we will still support KDE on SuSE. However, we hope to use this opportunity to provide Linux developers and ISVs with a single stable platform for desktop application development.
Yes, we will keep the desktop distro free. We will even make things more free than they have been.
We're only just getting started. Stay tuned.
File selector dialog. Not file manager. The wrong word came out :-).
We don't have a fundamentally new file selection dialog, but we added some quickbuttons to the stock Gtk one that jump you to your desktop, documents or home directory. This makes it a bit easier to use.
Owen Taylor is allegedly developing a new file manager in Gtk 2.4 that should be much easier to use, and that we expect to see adopted across GNOME very quickly.
I was looking at 3.0.3, which only has five tabs. Good to hear the tab momentum continues apace in new versions of KDE
(Also, I wasn't really trying to FUD; just to illustrate the different value systems.)
We'll have Mandrake 8.1 support out this month.