In the news: Zarafa

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:04:28AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> So, Zarafa is getting a lot of press attention:
> 
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=6298
> 
> some of it is fairly unflattering:
> 
> http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3877446/Fedora-13-Beta-The-Seen-and-Troubling-Unseen.htm
> 
> I'm a bit uncomfortable with this myself; the availability of Zarafa in
> Fedora seems to be being read in ways in which we certainly didn't
> intend it (as an aspect of commercialization, as some kind of Red
> Hat-parachuted feature and hence an indication of RH's future
> directions, etc).
> 
> I'm wondering if perhaps we should pull Zarafa's mention as a 'feature'
> of Fedora 13, or if not that, then certainly develop a more coherent
> story about its inclusion, what it's for, why it's in Fedora, and the
> whole 'open core' angle on it...
> 
> What do people think?

As some others noted, I think pulling the feature is unwarranted.  At
least part of the compelling story around Zarafa is that it's included
because a volunteer took advantage of our open, community process to
get a cool piece of software into the distribution.  This happens
quite a lot, and deja-dup is another good example.  But that story
wasn't clear in the talking point, so I've corrected it for future
reporters who only read the talking point.

Comparing Deja-Dup and Zarafa in Fedora to something like Ubuntu's
Ubuntu One music store is comparing apples to oranges.  The Fedora
Project has no commercial agreements with these companies and receives
no money for them.  They're provided because volunteers decided they
brought worthwhile solutions to users with 100% FOSS.

Also, I've dropped a comment at the article site, pushed a change to
the BFO FAQ indicating clearly that BFO is not part of Anaconda
itself.  That was the only location I could find that looked
potentially unclear.



-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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