Novell Hula

» see hula-project.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2005 I was a computer engineering student in Turkey and my mail lived in a browser tab on somebody else's machine. Hula was built for the person who runs the server, and that was never me. What makes it worth a headstone anyway is that it was one of the last times a large company tried to build a mail and calendar server around the person reading the mail rather than around the person signing the purchase order.

Novell announced it on 15 February 2005 at LinuxWorld in Boston. It was not written from scratch. Novell took NetMail, a mail and calendar product it had been selling for years, and opened somewhere north of two hundred thousand lines of it under the GPL. The result was pointed at a completely different customer. The stated goal was unusually blunt for a vendor announcement: build a calendar and mail server that people love to use, instead of broadly trying to build a groupware server that managers want to deploy.

That sentence was not an accident. Jamie Zawinski, who had built mail software at Netscape and watched the word groupware do its damage there, posted the same week telling Novell to make it trivially easy for one person to publish a calendar as plain HTML that any browser could read, and then to stop. Some version of his advice ended up on the project's own front page, which is a rare thing for a company announcement to survive contact with.

~ the record ~

~ what novell actually shipped ~

Hula ran on the ordinary protocols instead of inventing new ones. SMTP and IMAP for mail. iCalendar and CalDAV for the calendar side, at a point when CalDAV was still a draft rather than a standard anyone shipped. The web client was written to behave like an application instead of a page of frames, which in 2005 was a fresh idea and not yet a settled one.

The demos looked good and the mailing list was busy for most of a year. What Hula never got was the thing that decides whether a server product lives: somebody whose actual job was to make it boring and dependable for the next five years.

~ the day the funding stopped ~

On 28 November 2006 Novell said it would no longer have anyone work on Hula full time. There was no shutdown notice and no migration plan, because there was nothing to switch off. The code was public and the servers running it belonged to whoever had installed them. Novell simply stopped paying salaries, which for a project like this is the same event.

Two months later, on 31 January 2007, The Messaging Architects announced it was acquiring NetMail from Novell and taking over leadership of the Hula project. That is the sentence that always reads like a rescue and almost never is one. The project website was gone before the end of the year.

~ the inheritance ~

A fork called Bongo picked up the code and joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. It shipped for a few years and then went quiet without announcing anything, which is how nearly every fork of an abandoned company project ends.

The idea outlived the software. Everything Hula was arguing for in 2005 is now normal, just not as something you install yourself. Calendars publish to a URL, and CalDAV became the standard that both Apple and Google ship. The part that got buried with Hula was the assumption that any of it would run on a machine you owned.

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