Hula
I recently started poking at Hula, the newly
open sourced calendar & mail server. I don’t really know what to make
of it yet, other than what jwz had to say.
The mail server portion isn’t that interesting. With Sendmail, qmail,
postfix, and so on, I think we have more than enough MTAs today. But
there still isn’t a good calendaring server out there. Note that I
didn’t have to limit it to “a good open-source calendaring server”,
because as its users will tell you — in particular its non-Outlook
users — Exchange sucks.
With iCal & Mozzila’s Sunbird, there’s
a lot of progress on the client-side of things. Offered a solid
alternative, I think there’s a chance exchange/outlook’s
dominance might start to wane a bit.
That is a big “if”, however.
Eric Allman, described his creation as
“Sendmail started out being a sledgehammer used to kill a fly, only to
discover that the fly was actually an elephant in the distance.”
Meaning, email is a *lot* harder than it looks. Picking up the Bat Book, you get
just a taste of the millions of things that need to be addressed & can
go around. (I know I never want to deal with it again.)
Having dealt a small bit with calendaring on a project a few years
back, I know calendaring can be the same. But still — a world with
free of Outlook & Exchange… that’d be pretty sweet.
