Exchange is Microsoft’s highly successful groupware application. Its main competitor in the Windows world would be Lotus Notes.

In the Linux arena, one Exchange’s main competitors is Novell’s OpenExchange. OpenExchange uses the OpenExchange engine developed by Netline Internet Services. Netline Internet Services announced that they are giving away the OpenExchange engine under the GPL Open Source licencing scheme giving customers and partners the ability to download the code for free as well as to contribute to the project.

The open source version of OPEN-XCHANGE‚Ñ¢ will be available free by download at (www.open-xchange.org and http://www.openexchange.com) by the end of August and will feature most of the award-winning attributes of the commercial product – running on the major Linux operating systems (Novell’s SUSE LINUX, Red Hat, Red Flag, Debian) — but without support and maintenance, third-party applications and connectors.

It will be interesting to see how this will affect Novell’s pricing for OpenExchange and even more interesting to see how it affects Microsoft Exchange and OpenGroupware – currently the only serious Open Source Groupware application.