Novell drops Hula's hoop

Posted on 30 Nov 2006 at 15:37

'Linux' company Novell has ceased involvement in an open-source group collaboration project once described by Tim O'Reilly as 'a project to watch'.

First started in February 2005 when Novell's Linux marriage was still on its honeymoon, the Hula project was billed as an open-standards, highly scalable and flexible collaboration suite based on code taken from Netmail.

The company intended to use it to sell to users of commercial equivalents but which were based on 'decades-old designs'.

Just weeks after the announcement at the company's annual BrainShare conference, Novell's ex-Chair Jack Messman said: 'Hula is already on course to prove that Hula is to collaboration what Apache is to web servers,' said Messman. 'Together we will build the future of collaboration, and we will do it in Open Source.'

Fine words, but it now appears that lack-lustre demand meant its future looked severely limited. Novell's Peter Teichman, who led the project said that Hula makes: 'an excellent mail server, to be sure, but nearly every organization we've talked to already has a mail infrastructure. Bringing Hula in for the webmail means duplicating
their SMTP, IMAP, and POP setup.'

He described the decision to cut off support as one of prioritising resources for Novell. 'Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on Hula. 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... 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 said his team was consulted throughout the decision making process and that a first 1.0 release for the DragonFly web interface is a matter of weeks away, offering hope to anyone wishing to take on the project.

Author: Matt Whipp