On 15/01/13 03:49, Filippo Carletti wrote:
[English is not my native language, please bear it in mind if some of
my sentences may seem incorrect/inappropriate]
I also don't understand why this effort wasn't put into SME
Server 8. Supporting both simply won't happen and the guaranteed
fragmentation of the community is sad.
Gordon, nice to hear from you.
I think that you (and many others reading here) are missing the
discussion that took place in September/October 2009 (more than three
years ago) in the "Board" mailing list.
There, we talked a lot about the future of SME and came to nothing.
During the last years, I, Federico and Giacomo contributed to sme
providing bug fixing, patches, new features, testing and a bit of
support. Sometimes, we had our patches refused, especially for new
features. It forced us to fork some sme packages, we did that with
disappointment, we tried really hard not to fork, but we have a
business and our customers always have a point, so if the feature they
were asking for was useful we developed it, submitting a description
to contribs bugzilla, providing code and building packages if code was
approved.
We have been and still are very open to discussion.
But the discussion that took place in the close Board mailing list led
us to think that a new effort to further develop sme was doomed to
failure.
We set some key points (close to upstream as much as possible, proven
technical base, well known and widely used components), we aimed at
some goals (simplicity, user and sysadmin friendliness, easy
troubleshooting) and tried to imagine where we wanted to go.
Now, we have reached a point were we have something working, and we
wanted to show our work.
It's an alpha release, it has bugs, it is subject to changes. But it's
modular, easy to customize and modify.
It's GPL, every issue is publicly discussed on redmine.
I wish everybody a happy new year.
--
Ciao,
Filippo
Hello Filippo,
Thank you for keeping an open mind and sharing your thoughts. I recall
the discussions in 2009 and share your frustration.
As I understand, you have a significant customer base in Italy and the
new version you and your team are working on is intended to service this
market. We are talking of a commercial venture, correct? All of this
development has to be paid for, how do you propose to recover costs?
Will there be any subscription fee for updates, or access to modules, or
any other cost-recovery mechanism? Would you care to share your
business model?
It would also be useful if you could share your vision in terms of the
existing user base of SME. How do you propose to address the following
topics:
- Mirrors? How many and where?
- Support?
- Forums?
Finally, how far are you prepared to compromise to accommodate the needs
of "low budget" users, in particular NGO, schools, non-profit
organisations etc? At the moment, SME is not very demanding. The
software can be installed on rather modest hardware and configured using
an old monitor thanks to a simple graphical interface and console. As a
result, there are quiet a few "older" servers out in the field still in
good working condition - replacing them to meet Nethserver H/W
requirements may not be feasible in the short term. Any plan for a 32
bits version?
Thanks.
chris
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