This page is dedicated to the memory of a long-defunct project on which I truly enjoyed working, and in a sense still do today.
Hula was an open groupware server, the liberation of Novell's NetMail.
The short story is, rather than releasing early and often, we made all the
mistakes a project like this can make, and never got to 1.0. Conferences
were attended, developers paid, marketing splurged (and if I remember
correctly,
somebody
paid a buttload of money for hula.org, which is
one of the reasons I scooped it up for nothing when I got the chance).
But the world never got a Hula release.
If you're interested in a free/libre mail/calendar/address book server,
the closest thing that exists to what Hula was meant to be may be found
here:
https://sogo.nu/
The Linux Journal documented Hula both as a promising new project and
a dead one:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8214
https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/scalable-opengroupwareorg
Hula was also featured as a cautionary tale at Transfer Summit:
https://www.slideshare.net/stephenrwalli/symbian-collaboration-open-closed-dead
Some of Hula's code lives on, in a variety of forms.
Bongo was a direct fork.
Doesn't seem to be active anymore.
Netmail-open released
a number of underlying components used in Hula, including
memmgr, connio, iobuf, and the many cross-platform (xpl) libraries.
NetGovern (formerly Netmail, formerly
Messaging Architects) still uses Hula code in its platform services,
though none of the end-user mailserver/calendar/contacts features remain.
Hula is the project I fell in love with at Novell, the code base I followed to Messaging Architects, the one I helped rebuild into M+ Guardian and NetMail Secure, and is basically why I am where I am at NetGovern today. I'm the only one left here who was on the original Hula team, so when this old domain was set to expire, I felt like it was my turn to carry the torch.