So, I had a chance to install Hula at home this last week. I was very impressed. I haven’t completed reading all of the setup, but it is up and running. I have run into some issues with the reverse proxy, but I need some time to figure out if it is me or some issue with how the proxy is suppose to work. I pulled a copy of mod_proxy_html.so from a mandrake rpm since I couldn’t find a suse built version. I also didn’t want to pay 50 Brithish Pounds for a pre-built binary. So I have posted it here for anyone that wants it. On SuSE linux, it should be placed in /usr/lib/apache2 with a symlink to it from /usr/lib/apache2-prefork.

I haven’t done anything with the calendar part yet. My wife and I have needed a shared calendar for sometime and this will fit the bill.

I think what Novell did by donating the NetMail base code was genius. I think it is a great model for OSS. Like with IBM and the Cloudscape database….now called Derby. I think that companies like Adobe should (And I know that this has been said before) give the code for the products that they are no longer going to support and give them to the Open Source community. They should choose a license that best fits their business needs. (Heaven knows there are more than enough to choose from!) If they choose one that would allow them to take from the enhancements made by the community and incorporate them into the products that they continue to support commercially, (I am thinking here specifically about Golive and Dreamweaver. However, if they decided to drop ColdFusion, I think that there would be a lot of support for it to continue to exist as OSS. Also, JRun, which would probably be just be one more product in an already saturated market, could be given to the Apache foundation. I think its polished ‘commercial’ admin interface would be a great addition to tomcat.) I think they would benefit greatly from the innovation brought forth from the Open Source community.

Now, why would they want to put products out there that could be competing directly with their own commercial offerings? They probably wouldn’t. I wouldn’t expect to see an Open Source version of Fireworks or Photoshop. But if modeled correctly, they could use the open source version of their software as stepping stones to the commercial offerings. It would probably take a couple of years to see a combined best of breed version of the similar product offerings from Adobe and Macromedia, but obviously, the model must work… think, the IBM WebSphere family and Eclipse, IBM’s DB2/Informix databases and Apache Derby, and now Novell’s Groupwise and Hula. I think that there are sound business models already in play that show that this can be very successful.

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