Hi Janos
Your announcement to introduce a commercial edition of Piler is exciting.
However, I would like to offer some observations on this subject.
If you look at many mainstream open source organisations, you will find
that they do successfully offer OSS and Commercial packages. However,
the CE packages tend to be more bleeding edge and feature rich than the
commercial versions. This is because the commercial users are prepared to
pay for package stability and commercial support as opposed newer features,
many of which have not yet completely finished testing and development. So
the CE versions are where new features are developed and tried out, in return
for which the CE usage is free. Mature code from the CE edition is then
incorporated into the EE edition - which offers enterprise features,
package stability and commercially licensed support.
As such, I would recommend that we consider the existing changes as initial
development of the CE edition. Once CE multitenant has reached a reasonable
stage of stability and development, we can take the stable code and package
it as the EE offering which will generate revenue for you.
Having to already pay for an "EE" solution which is constantly changing,
always in development and consequently fraught with buggy behaviour is
actually the main reason why we are investigating Piler right now. I think
forking Piler into a commercial package which has it's own development path
will also inject the same problems we have with our current commercial vendor.
What we, and most other commercial institutions want from an EE model is stability
first of all, and commercial support second. An off the cuff example of the
above would be Redhat Fedora vs Rehat Enterprise Linux.
Regards
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Darryl Sutherland Senior Linux Administrator |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Janos SUTO" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday, 16 February, 2014 12:17:07 PM
Subject: some future plans for piler, and a 10 question long survey
Dear piler-users,
piler has started as an open source email archiving project, and I
believe
that it's a worthy candidate from the short list of the available open
source
solutions.
Recently I've been working on adding an improved multitenancy support
for piler,
and in the meantime I've been thinking whether to release a commercial
version
of piler, an enterprise edition or similar as well.
If I succeed with this, then piler will have two editions, a community
edition
(CE), and an enterprise edition (EE).
The plan is to keep improving the CE version, as well as to create a
value added
version (EE) with some useful features for enterprises or service
providers.
I'd like to clarify that I don't want to disappoint you by dumbing down
the next
CE version, and moving most of the attracting features to the EE
edition.
However I'd like to get a better understanding of your needs,
expectations, and
how you use piler, so I fabricated a 10 question long survey, and I'd
like you
to provide some feedback.
Please find the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W7WRG7C
If you think that some questions should be discussed on the list, then
feel free
to share your comments here.
Thanks for completing the survey,
Janos
