Linux Distro Xandros Buys Email Specialist Scalix

Published: July 24, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

They became partners earlier this year, and now they are a single company. Xandros, an up-and-coming commercial Linux distributor based in New York that wants to bring Linux to Windows shops, has acquired Scalix, a maker of open source messaging and calendaring software that hails from the HP-UX Unix base and that was ported to Linux a number of years ago after a licensing deal with Hewlett-Packard.

Xandros, like Scalix, is founded on the basis of a discontinued product that a larger vendor grew weary of supporting for no good reason other than it had other fish to fry. Xandros is the Linux distributor created from graphics and word processing software maker Corel's attempt to get into the Linux business with a variant of Debian Linux, which Xandros took over in 2001 and has substantially improved, particularly with systems management extensions that make Linux easier for Windows administrators to cope with and for Linux to interoperate with Windows administration tools.

As for Scalix, HP wanted to get out of developing and supporting its OpenMail software for HP-UX and licensed it to Samsung and Scalix, who each created products around the email solution and then extended it. Scalix did a particularly good job of integrating with Microsoft's Outlook email client, and its homegrown MAPI interface makes Outlook think it is actually talking to Microsoft's Exchange email server, fully supporting all of the calendaring and messaging functions of Outlook and Exchange. Other open source email and calendaring products support some or many Outlook features through IMAP protocols, but Scalix has contended that only its eponymous products do it all through its MAPI interface. Perhaps most importantly for Scalix, last August the company obtained permission from HP to allow the code behind the original OpenMail and buried inside Scalix to be licensed under open source licenses. The Scalix mail server, directory server, installer, administration console, Web Access Mobile, search and index services, and Scalix Ready components were open sourced under a Mozilla Public License, and the code that Scalix created to link its groupware to the open source Evolution email client managed by Novell is under the GNU General Public License. The MAPI code for linking Outlook at Scalix as well as Scalix's own Web interface, which is coded in Ajax, were not taken open source, since they were the secret sauce that compelled people to spend $60 per seat for tech support on the Scalix products.

In August, when Scalix announced its open source plans, it had 400 paying customers using Scalix Enterprise Edition and over 35,000 downloads of Community Edition with an estimated 1 million mailboxes in use. That is about two orders of magnitude smaller than IBM's Notes/Domino base and Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange base, respectively, but Scalix was growing pretty fast and was getting in position to benefit from a move to open source messaging and calendaring among Windows shops that did not want to move to newer editions of Exchange, Outlook, and Windows.

Xandros says that as the deal closed, Scalix had over 200,000 downloads of Community Edition, which shows how quickly the Scalix base has been growing. However, the fact that Scalix has sold out to Xandros is probably the strongest evidence that getting people to pay for tech support on a quality messaging and calendaring product may not be as easy as it sounds. Suffice it to say, if Scalix was making big bucks, it would not have sold to Xandros or anyone else.

It is unclear what plans Xandros has for open sourcing these two remaining bits. Taking them open source under a GPL license may not be possible because of intellectual property issues between HP and Microsoft, which partnered to create some of the guts of the MAPI code before Scalix got the right to use and sell it. The remainder of the code, available as a closed source, binary variant called Scalix Community Edition, was taken open source in the first quarter of this year.

In April, as Xandros was getting ready to launch its own Xandros Server Standard Edition 2, which features integrated support for server virtualization as well as improved Windows-Linux interoperability, Xandros said that it would partner with Scalix to deliver an integrated bundle of Xandros Server 2 and Scalix 11 Enterprise Edition. Since then, Xandros has inked a partnership deal with Microsoft, which will get the two companies working together on interoperability issues and which will also provide patent covenants to Xandros customers, indemnifying them from possible intellectual property lawsuits should Microsoft decide to sue the open source community for code it believes it owns within Linux and other open source software related to the Linux software stack.

Xandros did not announce the financial terms of the deal, but Andreas Typaldos, chief executive officer at the company, did say that the combined companies would have over 100 employees. All of the Scalix employees relating to engineering and support came over to Xandros, and most of the salespeople came over, too. Glenn Winokur, chief executive officer at Scalix, is not joining Xandros, but he is going to work on the Xandros Advisory Board. Typaldos said that Xandros will continue on Scalix' original open source plans for its software, and that the company will continue to support other Linux platforms going forward as well as working to more tightly integrate Scalix with Xandros Server. Scalix will be operated as a wholly owned subsidiary, and Typaldos will be president of Scalix as well as CEO of Xandros. The Scalix engineering team will report to the Xandros engineering team as well. Xandros has no intention of changing the Scalix branding, and in the fall, the company expects to take some of the system management smarts from its BridgeWays product and apply it to the Scalix code. Xandros will continue to support other open source messaging products, such as Zimbra and Open-Xchange on its Xandros Server.

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