[Kolab-devel] important news on Kolab Enterprise and Community editions

[Aaron J. Seigo]

Hello!

I am excited and pleased to share with you some very big news as we come to
the end of 2015: we here at Kolab Systems have decided to focus on producing
one high-quality set of Kolab releases and packages for all to enjoy, use and
benefit from.

Yes, this means that we are erasing the difference between Enterprise and
Community editions of Kolab, to bring the best of both worlds to, well, the
world!

Jeroen is away in the Netherlands for the holiday season, and I am busy with
assembling year-end retrospectives for us to plan with .. but in January we
will be engaging with community members at large to build a shared roadmap and
figuring out the best way for us all to coordinate release and packaging
efforts.

This should not take the wind out of the sails of the Kolab 3.5 efforts
Timotheus has been spearheading .. in fact, it will put even more wind in them
by bringing all of our efforts together to one end product. Huzzah!

You can read more about this on my blog:

https://exote.ch/blogs/aseigo/2015/12/15/streamlining-the-kolab-release-strategy/

.. which also links to a couple of Jeroen's blog entries on the topic.

The next few blog entries on my blog will cover our plans for a reboot of
kolab.org and partner enablement ... all of this is set to come together in
the first months of 2016 to add some serious horsepower into the Kolab
ecosystem.

Questions, feedback, ideas, etc .. all welcome.. .and look for a Doodle in
early January for scheduling an "all-hands" community meeting around Kolab!

[Timotheus Pokorra]

Hello Aaron,

Post by Aaron J. Seigo
Questions, feedback, ideas, etc .. all welcome.. .and look for a Doodle in
early January for scheduling an "all-hands" community meeting around Kolab!

thank you for your email!

I guess I am still wondering what it all means. But we need to start
talking again at some point, so your initiative is helpful!

Here are just some points I want us to consider. But probably only in
January, as everyone should enjoy the holidays and not think about
software too much... though we will anyways ;)

the points:
* We need a maintenance team for the build infrastructure. Or use the
infra structure provided by a bigger community/company. Perhaps now
that the Enterprise version will be open as well, we could use the
public OBS https://build.opensuse.org/?
* even with all the continuous delivery, we need proper releases of
upstream projects, eg. libkolab, kolab-utils, etc I guess we should
have a time based release cycle. Perhaps half a year, perhaps once a
month. I like it how gitlab are doing it:
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/12/17/gitlab-release-process/ I really
enjoyed reading that article, and I can confirm that their releases
keep coming every month...
* we need better official communication about the releases of the
upstream projects
* we need more participation of Kolab Systems staff on the mailing
lists. Some people are there already.
* I personally think we should encourage efforts to get Kolab into the
distributions. Mageia is quite advanced on this, and for Fedora we
want to do the same in the future. I think that is one way of
increasing the community of non-paying but contributing users. This
will increase confidence for paying customers, and will make good
marketing. This will benefit Kolab Systems as well. I think we all
believe that is how Open Source and Free Software works.

There are probably more things.
I am looking forward to the next year!

Have a nice Christmas! God became one of us to rescue us! Wow!

Timotheus