I, on the other hand, tend to see things as J. A. Calvo sees them. And I have yet to see a commodity router do what Zentyal does, and does better even where there is overlap.
I tried VPN using commodity hardware in a Windows shop. The fact that all that commodity hardware is now in storage speaks for itself,
especially given the fact that I am very much a GNU/Linux n00b.
And robust HTTP content filtering and virus scanning on a consumer box? I've not seen anything in commodity hardware that comes even close to the power and flexibility that the eBox proxy implementation offered (haven't managed to play with Zentyal yet
). For those of us who need reliable, robust content filtering for accountability and security purposes, the commodity market has nothing serious enough, to my knowledge, to qualify.
And what commodity router throws a chat server in for good measure?
I was drawn to eBox in a small business environment
because it was an attractive alternative to costlier network appliances. It had virtually no groupware capability in those days, so that wasn't the draw. As it was included, it was frosting on the cake.
Today, I would deploy Zentyal as a stand-alone groupware server if it had the type of fully integrated knowledge worker support I want. I get the focus on e-mail, contacts, calendars, and easy synchronization, but that's simply too narrow a focus, IMHO, in the SMB market. Integrated knoweldge tools are not the same thing as integrated communication tools. SMBs that are already using the cloud--and many of them do--for what Zentyal 2.0 offers in the groupware market will have little incentive to change. SMBs that have Web hosting are in about the same place.
So in my real world situation, and in my real world advocacy of Zentyal as an SMB/non-proft solution, the robust infrastructure offerings are easily the draw. I can't afford, long term, to entrust either my knowledge worker tools or my communication tools to open source solutions unless I have reliablity, continuity, and recovery in the can. eBox didn't deliver that, and Zentyal isn't heading that direction. But single-handedly, Zentyal puts significant infrastructure capability into the hands of SMBs with cost-effective options, stuff that would cost much more as standard network appliances even if built on top of a commodity hardware infrastructure.
This all becomes especially important as the distinction between community Zentyal and professional Zentyal becomes more defined, I think. It will be interesting to see how that plays out both within and outside the Zentyal community.
All just my own 2 cents, of course.