[Hula-general] Hula status

[Peter Teichman]

There have been questions recently about the status of the Hula project,
and I apologize for the silence while things have been sorted out on
Novell's end.

The quick synopsis is, Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on
Hula.  As a team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula
project is and the opportunities in the market and in the end we had to
conclude that we couldn't justify investing at the same level in Hula
going forward.  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.

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 and continue to move things forward
with direction.

It has been a great experience working on Hula full-time, and no one
here has any ill will toward Novell.  It was a difficult decision, but
our group was involved throughout the process.

I think the project is in a good spot - we're probably a couple months
from a 1.0 with Dragonfly, though there's some significant work that
needs to be done to meet that goal.

As such, I personally believe the steps taken to get Dragonfly running
against other mail servers (hula-lite) are the best way for Hula to move
forward.  I think the web interface is where we've done the most
interesting work, and integrating that with existing mail systems is the
key to getting good and usable open source webmail out to the public.

The rest of the Hula stack is an excellent mail server, to be sure, but
nearly every organization we've talked to already has a mail
infrastructure.  Bringing Hula in for the webmail means duplicating
their SMTP, IMAP, and POP setup.

That's just my opinion, of course - there are a lot of people who
believe the fast, stable mail server is the most important thing in the
project, and there is some good work in that direction that could make
it even better.

Anyway, I'd like to thank everyone for your time and support.  It has
been a great year for me on the project, and I look forward to seeing
Hula succeed in the future.

Peter