On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 18:26 -0400, Jan Wildeboer wrote:
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.
Jan,
I shouldn't even be posting on this thread, but do we take any benefits by doing such? And how would we cross those beneficts vs our current work load? Should we drop FOSS assignments for it?
That's pretty much the only thing I could say. Not turning up or down, neither want to crash no one's parade.
nelson
We are not discussing feature wars of whatever project/product.
Jan
----- Original Message ----- From: marketing-bounces@lists.fedoraproject.org marketing-bounces@lists.fedoraproject.org To: Robert Scheck robert@fedoraproject.org Cc: For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base marketing@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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