I'm very sad to hear that Novell will be dropping Hula and withdrawing the lead developers. They claim there is no market for the product, but I know that a lot of people (including me) have been looking forward to a first official release for a long time. Perhaps this is just a result of their recent cosy relationship with Microsoft.
The Hula Project is (was) an email and calendaring server with Googlesque web interfaces which was set to rival Microsoft Exchange. I was particularly interested in the CalDAV support for calendaring and LDAP address books. The problem was that it has been in development for so long and other projects have sort of filled the void.
I'm sad that the Hula Project has lost it's commercial sponsor and I now can't help but feel that it was given away in the first place because it was considered to be of no commercial value. But I hope that this is only the beginning. I hope that the open source community can now adopt this project and it will live again, perhaps under a different name.