First of all, I agree that what Erik said was spot on. And I'm not against ESME being seen as targeted for the enterprise, I'm against it being seen as inflexible. So, if Darren sees an organization (like a school) as an enterprise, I think we're not in disagreement.
> Are you suggesting we should rename ESME to SME? :-) I'm reminding that we shouldn't let ESME lose the S as in "social" and become EME :-) This thread started in the context of growing the community, and we can do that only if we're taking care to be inclusive, not exclusive. Of course ESME cannot succeed if it tries to be just another laconi.ca. But Bertrand has a valid point in that it should be easy to experiment with (the last letter E in ESME still stands for "experiment"). To expand on the example of authentication, if we only provide Kerberos/LDAP/Active Directory, few people will commit the time to set it up just to try it. There's another story to clarify what I'm trying to say. There was a small company building a product, and a big company interested in the product buys the small company. In a couple of years the product is integrated, but becomes so entangled in the big company's software suite that noone else can use it, so its previous customers eventualy shift to other products. A few more years pass and the big company decides to correct the mistake and make the product more modular and decoupled from the big software suite. I wouldn't want ESME to repeat the mistake of our hypothetical product. To summarize: if ESME is seen as too dependent on particular enterprise features, fewer people will give it a try. If ESME is seen as having no enterprise features, people might give it a try, but will not see a reason to keep on using it. Being both open-source and focused on the enterprise is tricky. As Darren mentioned, the enterprise might be willing to allocate resources if the software is "almost there". If the software is not ready, a community independent of a particular company is vital. > So small and simple is key, and I'll throw in extensible and adaptable. A big +1. I have the feeling Erik is referring to the same thing, but seen from a different angle.
