Scalix Goes Open Source, Preps Scalix 11 Groupware

Published: August 1, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux groupware vendor Scalix has been dying to jump on the open source bandwagon for years, but has not been able to because if its licensing agreement with Hewlett-Packard. But last week, that all changed, and now, thanks to a renegotiation of licensing terms with HP, Scalix is now able to offer an open source version of its product.

The Scalix server handles email and calendar serving, and it is based on a licensed version of HP's OpenMail software. Scalix negotiated with HP through around the middle of 2003 to secure the rights to develop a version of the OpenMail program, which HP sold on its HP-UX Unix variant, for Linux. Unfortunately, Korean electronics giant Samsung had received a license ahead of Scalix (by nearly two years, in fact) and created the Samsung Contact Server for various Unix platforms. According to Glenn Winokur, chief executive officer at Scalix, HP's original hope when it exited the OpenMail business (largely as a means to cut costs in the wake of the Compaq acquisition) was to license the underlying technology to a lot of companies. But Scalix and Samsung were the only two, and as long as there were two, it was hard to give the right to open source the code to Scalix without potentially upsetting Samsung. However, at the end of 2005, Samsung pulled the plug on Contact Server and said it would stop selling the program; the company is offering support through the end of 2007, and is advising companies to choose alternative technologies (and, luckily for Scalix, that company's groupware is the most obvious one). Another factor that played into HP's decision to reconsider the Scalix licensing agreement was the fact that HP, which stopped selling OpenMail five years ago, stopped supporting it at the end of March. "Enough time has transpired to allow us to come to an updated agreement," says Winokur.

Scalix 9, from 2004, was probably the software that put the company on the map. It ran on both Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linuxes and eventually was ported to Linux instances running on IBM mainframes. Because HP had strong ties with Microsoft, OpenMail had very good technology for supporting Microsoft's email and calendaring protocol, which is called MAPI. Other Linux-based email and calendar servers use the IMAP protocol and have to convert from IMAP to MAPI and back again as end users hammer the servers. Scalix 9 updates includes a Web mail client (created with Ajax user interface tools, although it wasn't called that back then), and Scalix 10 saw the release of a freebie (but not open source) Community Edition.

With last week's announcement, which is based on a revised contract Scalix signed with HP back in May, Scalix is basically taking the Community Edition product open source. It will probably take until the first quarter of 2007 for the company to clean up the code enough to let it out into the real world. (This is a due diligence as well as a personal issue. Programmers put all kinds of comments into the code they write, and the sarcasm has to be removed.) The MAPI code that allows Scalix to look and feel like Exchange Server will not be open sourced (because of some intellectual property issues with the agreements between HP and Microsoft from the prior decade) and the Scalix Web client built in Ajax will also remain closed source. The mail server, directory server, installer, administration console, Web Access Mobile, search and index services, and something called Scalix Ready components will be open sourced under a Mozilla Public License; exactly which license (since there are a few of them) is being worked out now. The software that Scalix created to link its groupware to the open source Evolution email client managed by Novell is under the GNU General Public License.

Before the open source Community Edition is put out in early 2007, Scalix plans to put Web services extensions to its program out as open source as well. The company, which only sold its program in English and German, has transformed the way internationalization is done inside Scalix, and with the upcoming release of Scalix 11 at LinuxWorld in two weeks, the company will be able to put kits together so the community can help offer multiple language and character set support for the Scalix software. According to Winokur, Scalix 11 will also include a substantially improved Web client, which was driven by customer demands. Like many groupware providers, Scalix thought of Web clients as a stop-gap measure for occasional use by, for instance, employees who are on the road. The assumption was that employees would generally use Outlook or Evolution clients most of the time. But some users--and a surprisingly large number according to Winokur--want the Web client to be their primary means of using the software. And so Scalix has had to get to work on more Ajax-developed features to bring the Web client closer to Outlook in terms of functionality.

A year ago, Scalix had 160 paying enterprise customers and they were using the software to manage about 50,000 email and calendar seats. Today, the company has approximately 400 paying customers and has had about 35,000 downloads of Community Edition. Scalix estimates that those commercial and freebie versions of its server are handling well over 1 million mail boxes today. It will be interesting to see if the open sourcing of Scalix Community Edition pushes these numbers a lot higher, or if just having free access to the software was the real driver of the increasing popularity of Scalix.

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