[Kolab-devel] Fwd: RE: New Kolab Website Live

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Hi Del,

On Wednesday 29 February 2012 22.04:15 Del wrote:
> Congratulations with the new web-site, it looks really nice. 

Thanks - it's a collaborative effort with some of the KDE community, in 
particular Nuno Pinheiro, and I think it is starting to look the way we want 
our website to be. 

But there is still quite a bit of work to be done. And as mentioned before, 
all help on the filling and maintaining of that site is very welcome. I think 
the Kolab community needs to get a lot better at making it easy for people to 
get involved - so one day I'd love to have tutorials for beginners, videos, 
some FAQs and all that.


> This is something I have been longing for for some time, and I think it will
> significantly help to spread the interest in Kolab.

Thanks. Yes, we believe so, as well.

We must get this native & as much upstream as we can.


> Point 6 may suggest that Kolab has moved to an open core model.

That is something that will *never* happen as long as I am involved.

In Kolab Systems, Open Core is typically called neo-proprietary, and there is 
*no* advocate for that approach involved on our side. In fact everything I 
have written while still with FSFE on these subjects still applies:

	http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=347
	http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=260

And yes, Kolab Systems is a Free Software company in that sense.

We have *no* dual licensing and do not think to ever introduce any.

We have assigned Copyright in some parts of the Kolab server to FSFE under the 
fiduciary programme, such as the Z-Push backend.

We always work with the upstream for as much as we can, making sure all our 
work not only benefits the Kolab users, but the communities at large, such as 
the work on the new web interface that has provided many of the improvements 
now found in the Roundcube 0.7 release, or our work on KDE PIM, which benefits 
all users of KDE.

As Jeroen already pointed out, the difference is in the area of Fedora vs RHEL, 
and likewise we're having one stream of packages that is available through 
software subscription with a set of extra QA and SLA to get guaranteed 2nd/3rd 
level support based on a reproduceable build.

It may in fact often end up having fewer features than the community edition, 
as that will have much lower standards for code acceptance and will be 
following a "features first" approach. 

We'll naturally still make that as good as we can, but it'll be more of the 
testbed and development version like Fedora is for RHEL.

In any case: There are no proprietary components in any of this, so anyone 
else is also welcome to take the components and put them together in 
intelligent ways.

But of course we hope that people will largely help us push the main stream of 
development to everyone's benefit, rather than splintering the efforts.


> BTW, I loved the foreword you wrote in "Open Advice" :)

Thanks! I was hoping it would set the right context for the book. :)

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve
Chief Executive Officer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: greve at kolabsys.com
t: +41 78 904 43 33
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve
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