Comments

• Ian

  2007-01-31 12:29:43

  Which is it, mixed source or legacy proprietary? That's a contradiction. If it's the latter, you have further contradicted it by mentioning OpenSuse.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2007-01-31 14:35:50

  You make a fine point, as usual, but what I had in mind are programs such as GroupWise. The aspiration, I believe, is to move a lot of the inter- and intra-business interaction (mail, calendaring, etc.) onto the Web (server-client model), using Open Source software.
  
  Hula could facilitate nice and seamless collaboration between Windows and GNU/Linux users in the workplace. Mixed environments are the only realistic route to adoption of SLED/Opensuse, no? As it stands, Evolution (with an immature Windows port), Mozilla Thunderbird and KMail seem like the solution to stick with. They don't perfectly integrate with Outlook/Exchange or Novell equivalents/alternatives. It was mentioned before that Hula was a threat -- however great or small -- to Exchange. It also brought benefits to other Open Source projects, so Novell had a chance to contribute a lot to the community. While this one project ran out of steam, I would happily agree that they help in other ways. The patent FUD that prevails and recurs in press releases is what angers the most.

• Ian

  2007-01-31 15:34:03

  Mixed environments is the name of the game and GroupWise works as well as any groupware system I know about. You can spread the groupwise system agents over NetWare, Windows, Linux, and even Solaris boxes I believe. In terms of web based interfaces, I'll go out on a limb and tell you that going 100% web based on the client will never fly. People aren't going to give up their "rich" clients any time soon.
  
  In terms of ever open sourcing GroupWise, I couldn't begin to tell you I know anything about what that would entail. If I had to guess, I'd say there's 3rd party bits which would make GPLing any of that software cumbersome and lead to a stall in the development of GroupWise as a whole. But I will say this, GroupWise customers would be none too happy if development actually went backwards.
  
  As for Hula, there couldn't have been a huge need for what it delivered or proposed to deliver. If it did, I would suspect there would have been a larger following from the user and development community. As it stands, there isn't, so I can't see the imperative need for that type of system.

• Keith

  2007-02-01 15:44:19

  As far as opensourcing groupwise, while at Gwavacon Dallas 07 it was stated that the crossplatform client & the web client would be opensourced (but not win32 client or the server itself) once groupwise 8 was released (projected nov30th 07').