In a posting to the Hula mailing list, Novell developer Peter Teichman admitted that the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company no longer has anyone working on the project. In the end we had to conclude that we couldn’t justify investing at the same level in Hula going forward, he wrote.
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, he added. 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.
The Hula project was introduced with much fanfare at LinuxWorld Expo Boston in February 2005 and saw Novell donate its NetMail web-based email and calendaring product to the open source project, as well as 25 engineers.
The goal for Project Hula is to become for Internet collaboration what Apache is for Web serving, said the company’s then-CEO, Jack Messman, at the time Together, let’s build the future of Internet collaboration, and let’s do it together as open source.
The plan was for Novell to eventually commercialize the Hula code as a project codenamed Maui, but by this year’s Novell BrainShare conference in March there were already some doubts over the future of the project.
When it’s ready we’ll take a look at it, said GroupWise product manager, Phillip Karren, noting that the company had not committed fully to Maui, but might end up using some of the Hula code to boost its proprietary GroupWise collaboration server.
They’re working on a CalDAV server and we want that, they’re working on a Web 2.0 client, we’re interested in that, he said at the time. If any good ideas come out of Maui, we’ll include them.
That seems unlikely now that Novell is not providing any developers to Hula, and while Teichman made positive noises about the future of the project, in particular the Dragonfly web interface, he also noted the abundance of mail server alternatives.
As well as Novell’s GroupWise, Microsoft Corp’s Exchange and IBM Corp’s Notes, which dominate the market, there are a number of smaller offerings and several open source alternatives, such as Zimbra, Open-Xchange, and Scalix.
In the meantime it appears that the Hula project will continue, with a number of Hula developers and enthusiasts committing their time and/or resources to the future of the project.
