Novell Abandons Hula

Novell said it would be able to invest further in the open source
community as a result of its recent deal with Microsoft. Apparently investing in its own open source mail server Hula Project isn’t going to be one such investment.


The company said it is pulling its paid developers from the
Hula Project, which it founded in February 2005. The Hula Project is an open source
mail and collaboration server, with its initial foundation based on 200,000
lines of open sourced code from Novell’s NetMail product.


“The quick synopsis is, Novell no longer has anyone working full time on
Hula,” Novell staffer Peter Teichman wrote in a mailing list posting. “As a
team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula project is and the
opportunities in the market and 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’s comments are in stark contrast to the bright future and high
hopes that Novell had for Hula only 18 months ago.

In a 2005 interview with
internetnews.com David Patrick, who at the time was the vice
president and general manager of the company’s Linux, Open Source Platforms
and Services Group, said that the goal with Hula was to create a
new-generation product and let it blossom.


“We will probably not have commercial products until early next year based
on the Hula engine,” Patrick said in 2005. “But ultimately we will sell a
commercial solution around Hula. Today the use-case model is quite different
than GroupWise, which is high-end enterprise collaboration.”


Patrick no longer works at Novell and no such commercial solution around
Hula ever materialized. Instead, other open source options from other vendors
such as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) have emerged to challenge the proprietary
stalwarts.


Though Novell will no longer be supporting Hula with paid developers,
Teichman noted in his posting that Novell does still care about Hula and is
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,”
Teichman wrote.


Early indications are that it’s a challenge that the community is willing to
undertake.


“I think this isn’t a bad sign for Hula, because it can be a chance,” Hula
community member Sebastian Döll wrote in a mailing list posting. “Now, the
community should decide where Hula should go.”


A strong voice within the Hula community is developer Alex Hudson whose name
was floated by a number of Hula mailing list posters as a candidate to lead
Hula in a Novell-less era.

In a posting of his own, Hudson admitted that more
people could have been involved in the Hula project previously and that
there were some issues with non-Novell employees being able to actually
contribute.


“In a way, only time will tell: will enough people work on Hula to take
it where it needs to go?” Hudson wrote. “Personally, I think enough will –
there isn’t a massive amount of work needed (though it is still a lot of
work), there are a number of people who know the code, and new people keep
dropping into IRC to talk about the code.


“A lot of people out there want to see Hula succeed, and a good proportion
of them – I hope – are willing to make efforts to see that happen.”

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