Advertising "open core" software

[Jan Wildeboer]

On 04/15/2010 11:28 AM, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:

> Yes, you are correct, fedora should be aligned with products and
> projects coming from companies that are 100% open source, optimally.
> As a marketing statement, this should be the way to go. Perhaps you
> want to use this as leverage with Zarafa to convince them to go more
> open, rather than just closing off any possibilities you have to use
> your position as a marketing team to build up a good relationship
> where a community member has already done the heavy lifting.

I am more fearful of an opposite possibility. That companies can "buy" 
themselves in to Fedora marketing. Noboidy brought this up *yet* but 
soonish someone will propose that companies could "sponsor" this. It is 
a natural thing to think about but it would be so wrong to do.

And with complete I mean that any fedora user must be able to use all 
the features of a project in the repos. If whatever part of the expected 
featureset needs external and possibly non-opne components, we cannot 
promote it.

Zarafa is not positioning itself on its own website as "All advantages 
of Micrososft Exchange at 50% of the costs" [1]. The version we have in 
the repos also seems to have a limit of 3 outlook users according to 
[2]. So in this specific case I do have some pain in promoting it. I 
would even go as far as saying that if the version of Zarafa in Fedora 
really has this 3 user limit it is against the philosophy and spirit of 
Fedora.

But that is not my call. As Zarafa is in the repos, I am sure this 
aspect has been throughly checked.

But as outlook integreation is a strong selling point for Zarafa, our 
users will expect this functionality to work. If it doesn't do that, we 
have a problem. And that is why I am not supportive of promoting it 
beyond the fact that Zarafa is in the repo.

jan

[1] http://www.zarafa.com/
[2] http://www.zarafa.com/content/editions
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Jan H Wildeboer                |
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