To be direct and honest I really don't like the idea at all, looks like it's going to head the way of so many other open source / commercial packages ultimately. If we fast forward to 1 or 2 years down the line, I can imagine many customers wanting to run the Enterprise version because of the extra modules/features but unable due to the price.
I can never understand why companies can't make their money from offering services around the product. i.e: - Commercial support billed per hour and/or SLA agreements with clients - Offer to install/setup Opsview for commercial purposes for a fee - Offer hosted Opsview (software as a service) for a fee, this is a great model for annuity income and ideal product for Opsview - Consulting services - Custom module development for a fee. - Etc. There are many ways to make income and keep the product fully open source. My thoughts Steven From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ben Sent: 26 May 2009 03:46 PM To: Opsview Users Subject: Re: [opsview-users] Moving towards two Opsview editions - Community and Enterprise So will the intention be to "beta" or "alpha" test stuff in the community edition a'la Fedora? On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 5:14 AM, James Peel <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Please read this post and let us have your feedback, either on this list or privately via my email account. As a result of feedback from our customers, we are considering a move towards providing two editions of Opsview, Community and Enterprise. There are three reasons for this change: - To address the often conflicting needs of our community and our enterprise customers (e.g. stability of code vs introducing new features) - To develop a more robust and predictable revenue model that can support Opsview development in the long term - To provide a stable, mature and predictable code base to larger users, so that they can plan and execute upgrades more efficiently Opsview customers come from Opsview users so there is clear justification for looking after our community so it will continue to grow and flourish. There is a commercial angle to having an Enterprise edition but since customers fund Opsview development this is in the best interest of the project. { Opsview Community } Opsview Community will be the 'core', stand-alone, fully featured monitoring software it is today. New features will appear in Opsview Community first. This gives everyone the chance to try them out and feed back to the development team. There will be frequent releases of Opsview Community and we will remove the distinction between 'Feature' and 'Point' releases since these boundaries are increasingly becoming blurred. The Source code and packages will continue to be freely available and we will continue to use the GPLv2 Licence for both Community and Enterprise editions. The release process will be similar to our current model so we don't expect any significant change in code quality or stability. This will allow us to release new functionality earlier rather than holding it back for a 'feature' release since this was previously driven, in part, by marketing considerations. { Opsview Enterprise } Opsview Enterprise is all about providing a mature product with predictable features and upgrade cycles based on a published roadmap. New features will therefore only be introduced into the Enterprise release once they have been thoroughly tested and are considered to be stable. We will publish a very clear release schedule and roadmap and we expect there will be 2-3 Opsview Enterprise Feature Releases a year. No new functionality will be introduced between Enterprise Feature Releases. There will be a transparent framework for prioritising defects and managing Enterprise Maintenance Releases. Access to Opsview Enterprise packages and source code will be via an Enterprise Service Subscription. The Licence will continue to be the GPLv2 Licence. { Opsview Modules } Our plan is to start introducing Modules to be used with Opsview Enterprise. These will consist of stand alone software that extends Opsview in some way. Modules will address specific requirements of Enterprise customers (e.g. better integration with Service Desk software) and will be available for Enterprise customers only. Requirements and features that we believe are releavant to a wide user base will continue to be made available through the core product in both Community and Enterprise editions. Nothing will be published on Opsview / Opsera websites until we've made a final decision. We will start compiling an FAQ based on your feedback which I will distribute via the Opsview Users mailing list. -- James Peel Opsview Product Manager E: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Opsview-users mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.opsview.org/listinfo/opsview-users -- Ben Lutgens Linux / Unix System Administror Three of your friends throw up after eating chicken salad. Do you think: "I should find more robust friends" or "we should check that refrigerator"? -- Donald Becker, on vortex-bug, suspecting a network-wide problem
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