The first casualty of the Microsoft-Novell deal

Many of the large, end-user oriented open source projects require many developers, mainly because to make something slick and user-friendly is not a small undertaking, and almost certainly beyond the means of one or two people within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the larger companies with a stake in open source software (e.g. IBM, Novell, etc.) offer up development resources in the knowledge that the end-result will benefit them as well as the wider OS community.

A project that was announced back in Feb 2005, namely Hula, is one such application. Hula, to quote their website, “is a mail and calendar server with a friendly web-interface designed for a great user experience.” In other words, a threat to Exchange. Oh sure, it doesn’t have the breadth of capability that Exchange does, but then how many businesses find themselves ‘upgrading’ to Exchange only to use the most basic of its functions (that same could be said for Office too).

As you can see from the Hula website, the major supporter of this project is Novell. Now hang on a second, didn’t Novell recently announce a new collaborative relationship with Microsoft ? Call me cynical, but is it possible that Microsoft saw a significant threat to their Exchange cash cow, and that the easiest way to kill it was to use the old Microsoft strategy of embracing it? And who loses out? Anyone that might have considered an alternative to Exchange, so a huge chunk of the business email market.

You know, I really hope someone else picks up the Hula project and runs with it. After all, it’s open source (albeit based on Novell’s NetMail product) so it should be possible.