Dear all, It's Happy Birthday Koozali Foundation :-)
Yesterday, 29th April was a year since the inception of Koozali, and 16 months or so since we kicked off dev on v9. Things have moved on a pace but there is still a long, long way to go. As you are no doubt aware, v9 is on the ragged edge of RC. Ian had hoped to get RC1 out for our birthday but there are some small but difficult issues that need resolving. You may be surprised at just how many people really work on development. The answer is 'VERY few'. If you look in the bug tracker you will see that in terms of active developers you can count probably them on one hand. We need to change that. I am not going to single anyone out for praise and embarrass them (Ian Wells), but all I can say is what a phenomenal and dedicated little group we have, and we all need to show our appreciation of their hard work. Even more importantly they badly need your help. To paraphrase JFK once again "ask not what your distro can do for you, ask what you can do for your distro" (he had some great speech writers !) The devs often get some unfair criticism (IMHO) from some quarters, but the simple fact is that they are UNPAID volunteers who do not get enough help. I have heard many over the last year telling me they want this or they want that in Koozali SME and it should be done here and now. But they are too busy to help. If we all took that view, there would BE no Koozali SME. So if you want to see Koozali SME develop, don't just tell us what you want. Get involved in making it happen, because it won't happen by itself ! Helping isn't hard - verifying a bug is one of the easiest and most effective ways of helping. If you don't know how then have a read on the wiki or "ASK" and we'll be pleased to help you learn. Look here : http://wiki.contribs.org/Verification_Queue Even better you could try and fix one. Have a look at http://bugs.contribs.org If you really are too busy earning money, or saving it, by installing Koozali SME and haven't got time to get involved in coding or verifying or writing documentation then why not salve your conscience a little and help financially? Make a donation. Even better, make it a regular one. Details can be found here : http://wiki.contribs.org/Donate It matters not what sort of organisation you are. There is no excuse not to contribute in some way however small - after all, you have most likely saved the licensing costs of using a different server :-) Please remember that Koozali SME Server is Open Source. But it ISN'T free to produce. Here endeth the pricking of consciences.... A few other items of interest. Donations ARE up, but still not really enough. We are starting to graph this and will make the data available shortly. Our biggest single cost is our hosting which runs at USD300 per month currently. VERY rough figures to the end of Feb were donations approx USD 8000 (about 800 per month) vs expenditure approx USD 3700 (approx 370 per month) though this is only a very rough guide - as we are trying to pay back some of the costs incurred personally such as the design work on the Koozali logo etc. so expenditure for the last two months will be higher than this average. We are also trying to start to build a small cash buffer to allow for one off costs, emergencies or whatever. Our accounts for the first year should be available shortly. Yes, we are now hosted in a data centre at Clear, but before any wars break out, that is as far as the relationship really runs. There are no plans or discussions on mergers or anything else. We are both doing our own thing. End of discussion :-) We have looked at the costs for moving to our own hosting. It is possible to do, but will take a lot of work, and all efforts have been concentrated on v9. After v9 we may have a closer look at moving to independent hosting, but it can't happen without help, and money. See above :-) There are other costs such as accounting, domain names, and some other expenses that are incurred. We would like to be able to invest more in the future of Koozali SME, be that with paid developers, marketing, or whatever, but that takes cash. We would love to try and organise a Koozali SME conference somewhere too, possibly on the back of a Linux/Open Source conference. I hope to be able to publish some budget plans so you can see where we are at and where we would like to go. Either way, we need money to do this, and we need to increase income quite considerably. We are starting to build a business plan and would like some help and input on the 'business' angle, so if you feel you can help constructively then please contact me. I have had requests that we look at some form of 'partnership' program for integrators and we will be looking at that as well. Regarding Koozali, we hope to launch the new website shortly and will keep you posted on this. We would like to revamp the whole contribs site as we move to Koozali branding, but again it is a lot of work with limited volunteers. Can you help ?? Once we have v9 out of the door one of the things in the pipeline is a a makeover for the server manager. The dev team is looking at using mojolicious for this and we can look at rebranding the server manager as Koozali SME. We can also start to look at some of the things on the wish list. Join the discussion here : http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server_wishlist or on the mailing lists which you can subscribe to here : http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/listinfo/ Clearly there are a number of items that people feel are important such as full LDAP integration and we can try and start to work on some of these things. I believe there have been some tentative first looks at RHEL 7 as well so we can see what's further up the road. It's a way off, but we are trying to think ahead ! In closing, I'd personally like to say an ENORMOUS thank you to everyone who has worked so hard over the last year to resurrect Koozali SME and drive it forward. We do have a great team and a phenomenal product which has a potentially bright future. Once again, PLEASE get involved and help in some way, however small. B. Rgds John Crisp President - Koozali SME Server _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail [email protected] Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
