> On an administrative note, was your email written with the OpenGroupware > mail client? Whatever tool you are using is randomly eating whitespace > between words in my text, which leads to /very/ poor readability.
No, I responded via Google's "Reply" button in Google Groups. Wierd. > > I certainly disgree about OGo's "semi-commercial" stature, but this > > seems to be a common misconception. There is nothing in the OGo > > server's feature list you don't get if you check out the code from the > > repository, > OK. That contrasts to Zimbra, where server-side features are also > commercial, and explains your point of view effectively, I think. Pretty much. I think there is a real, and very pragmatic, distinction between "the server" and "client applications". Regardless of the server anyone can license (or not) their client any which way they want. > > I *assume* that the notion that OGo isn't a truly Open Source project > > came from the existence of the ZideLook (commercial) product [the > > Outlook connector]. > My views came from the existence of commercial add-on products, and from > the fact that the commercial vendor who (a) sells the Outlook client and > (b) sells commercial versions of OGo is (well, was, and presumably still > is) also a major contributor to the product in terms of person-hours. Neither (a) or (b) are true. Skyrix,the company that used to own OpenGroupware, primarily takes the OGo codebase and produces their InstantOGo product. The line-of-code contributions from free / Open Source developers quite significantly outnumbers that contributed by Skyrix. Skyrix's contributions in recent years have been very small. Prior to 2003 OGo was a commercial product (like Netscape, Star Office, etc...) and the connector was developed (on contract I believe) between the OGo vendor and another organization. The organization that developed (and maintains?) the "old" connector doesn't have any relationship with the OGo project. One of developers that works on OGo also works on the "new" [GroupDAV] connector, that is the only connection with the "new" connector. I've no idea who is going to sell the new connector (or how it will be licensed) - there really is only that tenuous a connection. Skyrix still hosts the subversion and bugzilla servers. Moving the code repository to a code hosting service like Google Code is being considered. > In any case I didn't intend to suggest that the OGo server was not open > source, and I am sorry my comments read that way. I'm just keen on disabusing the notion; several others in other places have made the assertion in much stonger term then you, so it is an issue we've grown sensitive to. You can imagine how irritating it is to contribute, with others, a significant amount of time to an Open Source project, do some [what you consider] interesting things, and then have people accuse you of shilling a commercial product when nobody has paid you anything. Anyhow, I don't want to beat a dead horse and I think we agree 99% anyway. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
