Advertising "open core" software

[Jan Wildeboer]

This discussion gets out of hand and doesn't belong here. The original 
question was if fedora marketing material should promote open core software 
or not.

We are not discussing feature wars of whatever project/product.

Jan

----- Original Message -----
From: marketing-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org 
<marketing-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org>
To: Robert Scheck <robert at fedoraproject.org>
Cc: For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base 
<marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Wed Apr 14 18:08:58 2010
Subject: Re: Advertising "open core" software

On 04/15/2010 03:23 AM, Robert Scheck wrote
> Having this said, I'm pretty sure, that only less Fedora users care about
> whether Zarafa in Fedora has support for Outlook or not, because most of
> our Fedora users don't use Windows as their main operating system.

We really don't know much about our users.  They might be using Windows
or they might be working on a environment where a number of *other
users* are using Windows.

> Maybe
> you should see the benefit of what Zarafa open sourced so far: There is a
> full-featured Open Source MAPI implementation and library by Zarafa, while
> OpenChange provides in comparision only a few less percent of the overall
> functionalities and features - they're providing basics, but did you ever
> try something more extended? It doesn't work or it crashes. OpenChange is
> not usable in Enterprise so far, while Zarafa (even without the 
> proprietary
> features) is.
>

The whole point of MAPI is to talk to folks using Windows.  So you can't
really argue that Windows is irrelevant to our discussions.  Even in a
groupware deployment within Red Hat,  blackberry integration was
considered a blocker for example.    No doubt that open source features
are useful by itself but it should be taken into consideration that a
large scale deployment very likely would have to be buying the
proprietary version and IMO that should factor into our considerations
of what we promote within Fedora  regardless of whether you consider
your work in Fedora as a "test bed".   I understand you are associated
with Zarafa and worked on integrating it into Fedora but my position on
this concern around the model we are implicitly promoting rather than
anything against the software itself.    The question boils down to one
simple thing:  Should we promote "open core" software prominently within
Fedora?  You can take Zarafa completely out of the equation and still
answer that meaningfully.

> By the way, wasn't it you some time ago promoting the Omega Fedora Remix
> containing closed source software via the Fedora mailing lists?
>

Common confusion.  There is no "closed source" software in Omega.
What I include by default is the some software from the RPM Fusion -
free repo which are entirely free and open source software.  Being
patent encumbered in some regions doesn't make it non-free.    Anyway
this is off-topic to the current discussion.  If you have questions on
Omega, feel free to mail me offlist about it and I can discuss any
concerns in length.

Rahul
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