Bonum Certa Men Certa

Projects Seek Independence from Novell

Several month ago we mentioned Novell's abandonment of the Hula Project. Hula was seen as a competitor to Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange, so shortly after the deal, Novell had no desire to continue and it official dropped it like a hot potato.

We are pleased to say that a Novell-independent fork/successor of Hula has just been born. To quote an early announcement from Digg:

The Bongo project was born out of the Hula project. Bongo is a mail and calendaring application not a "groupware" solution. It is completely independent of Novell, Messaging Architects and Hula. It aims to offer a great user experience, and revive the idea that mail and calendaring are useful tools rather than burdens.


Hula may not be alone. Remember Compiz? It turns out that Beryl was set up for similar reasons. This fork, which equips Linux with 'eye candy', sought independence from Novell, according to this very recent message, posted to the Compiz mailing list.

One assumption is that compiz is some kind of Novell controlled project that Novell will move in whatever direction it wants. This is completely wrong. I started the project and no one at Novell has ever told me in which direction it should go.


It was worth mentioning that Beryl was born before Novell had made its deal with Microsoft. Here is a nice demo of Beryl mimicking Windows Vista.

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