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November 29, 2006 9:25 AM PST
Novell halts its Hula dance
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Novell tunes in open-source server software
February 15, 2005
In a message to Hula project participants Tuesday, Novell representative Peter Teichman said the company has decided to shift its efforts elsewhere.
"In the end, we had to conclude that we couldn't justify investing at the same level in Hula going forward. So those of us who have been developing Hula full-time will be moving on to other roles and to other parts of the company," Teichman wrote.
Novell launched Hula in February of last year as an open-source alternative to Microsoft's Exchange, IBM's Domino and Novell's own proprietary GroupWise product line.
At the time, company executives said the Hula project exemplified the company's dual approach to software development, melding both open-source and proprietary software.
But Novell has found that nearly every business customer it approached already had an e-mail and calendar server in place, Teichman said.
He said Novell is looking for members of the Hula community to take over Novell's leadership to continue working on the code. The initial release from Hula was slated to come out in a few months.
"I think the Web interface is where we've done the most interesting work, and integrating that with existing mail systems is the key to getting good and usable open-source Web mail out to the public," Teichman said.
By contrast, the project's server, while good, is largely redundant, he said.
"We still really care about Hula and are interested in working on it going forward, but I think we're going to need someone from the community to take a leadership role and continue to move things forward with direction," he said.
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I hereby nominate a new name for OpenSuSE:
OpenMSuSeless.
I'm also thinking OpenSuSe should be forked and supported by a group that isn't an MS puppet.
Let's be honest - OpenSuSe is a good product, but now that the strings being pulled have turned into steel cables...well, let's just say my faith in any company to purchase rights to a distribution, such as what Novell did, with the intent of supporting community efforts, is swiftly becoming less than zero.
Oh how a week changes everything.
As for me I like SUSE and I am confident Novell is doing what they feel is best for customer/users of SUSE. So switch if you do not like it.
If you want a real UNIX OS, go with Solaris, enterprise level OS.
So why waste money developing yet another mail server that has no real market.
Oh, I know. You're upset because you were counting on a free version of a mail package because you're too cheap to go out and buy a package like Exchange or Lotus.
Get a friggin clue.
This has nothing to do with MS, but that there is no market to justify the expense.