Hello,
thanks for both of you to share your thoughts. You both raised very
valid points.
On 2014-02-17 14:27, Darryl Sutherland wrote:
It's good to hear some community feedback on this, so thanks for the
post.
One could follow an example from mailborder or mailarchiva or magento
they
placed their ee edition under a beta with a trial license (free) once
the
product reached stability and a complete feature set +/- 12months the
product became commercial only.
this sounds like a viable approach.
I have experience with Mailarchiva, and it's trial versions are not
"free". You
have a limited time in which to use the product, where after it's
features are
locked and you have to pay to unlock the features you want.
Thereafter you find
yourself hopping from one broken version to the next, trying to fix
bugs by
upgrading to the "latest stable release" complete with it's own
broken code.
This is the kind of scenario I would like to see Piler avoid - where
features are
more important that application stability.
I think it's possible by supporting a given version of piler EE for a
year or so.
Currently I don't backport any fixes to the previous stable CE
releases, only adding
them to the current master branch. However with an EE release, eg.
1.1.0 there could
be 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ... as bugfix releases. Once a version (1.1 in this
case) is released
then no new features are added, only bugfixes, so there won't be any
new bugs (well,
at least not in theory).
We are not looking for a free ride - we just want a reliable, stable,
scalable
enterprise quality solution and are happy to pay to use it - as long
as it is
providing a stable, well tested code base.
that's fair enough
imply. That being said, we are open to discussions around funding of
Piler
development.
ok, we'll discuss the details, and I'm open to suggestions.
The only real people that get hurt buy the ee edition are smaller
companies,
however the ce edition would still offer enough value at the price
point even
if it lacks features.
well, I intend to keep improving the ce edition, and it may have all
the necessary features for archiving emails. However I believe that
some features may be more useful to bigger companies with more users,
so perhaps the smaller companies are not hurt (that much) by not
offering them some features they wouldn't use most of them.
Eg. an SMB company may not be interested in the accounting feature,
while
a service provider may appreciate it. So it seems to make sense to put
the accounting feature to the ee edition only. Note that this is just
an example, I won't remove any current feature from the ce edition.
Or another example could be the multitenancy feature. Probably an SMB
company doesn't need it at all. Anyway, I won't stop anyone to use
piler
ce, and to accomplish an ee-feature with it in creative ways.
I wouldn't like to see anyone getting hurt by the EE edition, which is
why
I would like to see Piler retaining a free to use (CE) edition. Right
now,
Don't worry, I'm going to keep the ce version, since I'm a great fan of
open
source products.
This cash injection would allow the mailpiler project to hire more
developers and grow.
indeed, there are some skills I could use to improve piler.
On 17 Feb 2014, at 1:24 PM, Darryl Sutherland <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
> 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.
ok, we'll see if it would work out.
Best regards,
Janos
