By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
It may be one of the most significant GPL moves made in the
software industry this year, but you may not have heard of the
product, or the company, that has been shifted to a GPL license
today.
The company is Netline Internet Service, a small German
development shop. The product is Open-Xchange Server. If that name
sounds a bit familiar, or if it looks like a typo, you are on the
right track. Open-Xchange Server is the core groupware engine for
the SUSE Openexchange Server product, and now it will be fully open
sourced, Netline announced today.
The move to shift to the GPL license came after Netline met with
Novell, the new owners of their long-time partner, SUSE Linux.
Novell, which since its purchase of SUSE has been a vocal advocate
of open sourcing more and more of its product line, sees the GPLing
of the Openexchange Server as a big move forward towards that
goal.
If one gets the impression that Novell, which owns its own
groupware product, Groupwise, pushed Netline to open sourcing their
Open-Xchange product as a form of protectionism, that impression is
quickly dispelled after speaking with Netline’s CEO, Frank
Hoberg.
Netline, which has been around since 1996, has been seeking a
way to open source its groupware engine since as long as 2000, but
was never able to serious consider it until 2002 and implement such
a strategy.until now.
“If you’re focused on Linux, you’re always thinking about open
source strategy,” Hoberg said.
Netline began as a Web site and Web software development
company, but was quickly met with customer demand for a groupware
platform that would match the capabilities but not the overhead of
Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. A partnership with Compaq led to
the release of an applicance-based groupware product in 2000, and
it was through Compaq that Netline was introduced to SuSE Linux
AG.
At the time, SuSE E-mail Server 3.1 was that company’s messaging
and collaboration product, but, according to Hoberg, “it had a lot
of problems with its groupware stack.”
Netline was able to punch through those problems, and in
November 2002 the first release of Openexchange Server was made.
The success of the partnership was hard to dispute. According to
customer data from the SUSE partnership program, 50 percent of
incoming SUSE partners joined because of the capabilities of
Openexhange.
Today, Hoberg explained, the market is still clamoring for
Openexchange, enough that Novell is adopting a two-pronged approach
for its groupware products. The open source Openexchange will focus
on small- to mid-sized businesses, while Groupwise will be aimed at
larger enterprise deployments.
Hoberg feels that the time is very right for open sourcing his
company’s Open-Xchange product. With only 50 developers, much of
his team’s time was spent in testing and certification instead of
raw coding. By making the code available to the open source
comnmunity, Hoberg fully expects to take advantage of the
community’s ability to test code and provide feedback.
This should, Hoberg believes, allow his team to devote more
resources to core development and speed up the development process
for Open-Xchange.
Since Open-Xchange is based on Netline’s Java Application Server
it, too, will be made open source. Netline’s product is comparable
to the JBoss application server, but it is entirely focused on
groupware functionality, Hoberg explained, and thus has a higher
performance level than JBoss in the groupware arena.
Hoberg emphasized that with the opening of Open-Xchange’s code,
his company’s products will now join an elite group of open source
middleware applications, including JBoss and the open-source
database MySQL. “These are the main components of any middleware
stack,” he said, “and now they’re open source.”
The open source version of Open-Xchange will be available for
free download at www.Open-Xchange.org and www.openexchange.com by
the end of August. It will feature most of the features of the
commercial Openexchange product, though without support and
maintenance, third-party applications, or connectors.