Zentyal Forum, Linux Small Business Server

News and Announcements => News and Announcements => Topic started by: robb on March 18, 2014, 03:23:46 pm

Title: Goodbye Christian
Post by: robb on March 18, 2014, 03:23:46 pm
Yesterday Christian left the zentyal forums. Christian was one of the oldest (in community years) and most helpful member and also had a lot of knowledge about Zentyal and Linux. He is specialized in (Open)LDAP and managed to help a LOT of Zentyal users during the years he was active here.

In my opinion this is sad news for Zentyal and the Zentyal community. I have had numerous discussions with Christian and on most issues we agreed that due to commercial decisions, the Zentyal project is drifting off from a true opensource project to a commercial project that offers a free Microsoft replacement. The project more and more focuses on replacing Active Directory and Exchange. All those other services seem to be less and less important.

Since the summer of 2012 there was less and less communication between the company and the community and a lot of _active_ community members left. I'd like to remember Sam Graf and iChat who also left due to different opinions in the choices made about the direction of the project.

Of course it is normal in any project that people come and go. But still, I think the reason why Christian left is sad enough and we loose a valuable member.

I'd like to thank Christian for all his work and time. I hope we keep in touch and good luck with any other project you will join.

regards,
robb
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: auerhaan on March 18, 2014, 04:18:41 pm
I agree
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: mpnegro on March 18, 2014, 04:28:56 pm
Very bad news...
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: ismaelnoble on March 18, 2014, 04:33:33 pm
i learned so much from simply reading his posts and discusions. he will be missed... :'(
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: jkerihuel on March 19, 2014, 05:40:06 pm
Christian was a very valuable contributor and member of the Zentyal community. We are thankful for all the time he has invested in helping countless number of users, solving doubts and problems they may have about Zentyal. I personally had a lot of pleasure discussing with Christian despite our diverging opinions.

I however don't understand this constant and unacceptable reference you make about Zentyal not being a true open source project. This is a gratuitous and unfounded attack. This is an insult to all the developers who have invested significant part of their personal time and professional carrier building up a free and open source stack to replace Microsoft software and services stack. This is above all despising the efforts of the Zentyal development team on the forum and tracker.

One one hand, you know where Zentyal stands and you know what we are heading to. The new Zentyal slogan should lead to no confusion: Active Exchange. On other hand, you are a forum moderator and to this regards, every time you post on the forums, you represent Zentyal. You are therefore expected to provide a minimum of respect and moderate your words some more. If you can't restrain your personal opinions or just want to express them freely, I would kindly ask you to have the same courtesy Christian did in giving away his moderation privileges.

There is no reason to be unhappy here, we just want this collaboration to be positive and rewarding but it won't work out if you keep being in this unhappy mood.

Br,
Julien.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: N. Balauro on March 19, 2014, 07:16:39 pm
@Julien: The fact that you take insult at being labeled as non-true opensource, then attempt to validate Zentyal Development's contributions by the amount of unpaid personal time and anti-M$ rhetoric invested, reinforces the simple fact, not attack- imo; that the direction of Zentyal is indeed not true OpenSource, as defined by Catb.

Granted, contributions of personal time, and intentions to provide FREE alternatives to the evil that is M$, are indeed at the core of OpenSource ideals... Zentyal Development is missing out on the MAIN key component of OpenSource... the Bazaar, or community. And this is the source of disagreement between Zentyal development, and contributors like Christian and Robb.

Zentyal Development's current direction is not led by the community, plain and simple. Thus, factually making it not true OpenSource. Ultimately, this discourages community contribution.

Dont get me wrong. I am thankful, as im sure are many others, for the Zentyal project and the efforts of its staff. There just appear to be philosophical disagreements between Development and the community's main contributors.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 07:43:14 pm
Oh god I better hold my hand up. I think I caused a lot of it but I didn't understand the level of animosity to a Samba4 directory.
I was hoping if I wore him down I would actually get him to capitulate and start working with Samba4.

We seem to have these two camps of proper linux uses OpenLdap, postfix and dovecot and all this M$ stuff (and it is me who always says M$) isn't proper linux.

I just view it as a solution to some problems of a M$ dominance and solutions rather than brands are more important. Opensource is opensource.
It took a landmark European court order to get M$ to release information and probably one of the biggest task has been by Andrew Bartlett and Tridge and all to provide Samba4.
For me this is massive and really important and for Zentyal to provide a M$ style offering is hugely important as M$ people don't understand Linux and the CLI.

It is really sad Christian has gone because one of the reasons I kept pestering him was if he did come on board I knew he could offer way more than myself.
In fact unfortunately I don't think there is currently a member of the community to match him.

I posted all the Catb stuff because also this split in the community was showing signs of people with status not liking opinion of different sorts.
Zentyal or Julien is under no obligation to be led by any community opinion. It is there choice. What is essential that opinion is open and that is what I got a bee in my bonnet about.

I really wish there was more interaction between Zentyal and the community to garner value though. Let the community provide. Help a small team provide big solutions.

It does seem really hard as a member of the community to have opinion.

Zentyal 3.4 is absolutely littered with 2.0 legacy and to be honest I do think you guys are trying to edge your bets. I wasn't joking about updating 2.0 that way we can streamline 3.0 so it really is active exchange whilst not losing community or revenue for other area's.

smite me I deserve it, its about time we set some records how much smite can this negative voice get in a day :)

I will work with anyone, want to work with all, am going to try my absolute best and I fully support Samba4 and Openchange.

I am going to start a conversation tomorrow about the two LDAPs and I would love to hear opinion without it getting into anything personal.
Reason is two directories is just not twice its 2^ and I see so many problems and extra requirements because of this.
Just to talk and ask why it is so, is there ways to make this more simple.

Also another one about bring back Zentyal 2.0 two products Zentyal Pure and Zentyal M$ how about that for marketing and spin saatchi told me all he knows :)

There is the question as a community can we actually discuss anything without it just turning into a mess?

PS I do really think CatB is really important as Opensource can be two distinct forms the Cathedral and the Bazaar I think we have a Cathedral style and believe this misses many huge advantages of the Bazaar.
   
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 08:22:55 pm
In fact everybody should start a thread on their Zentyal gripes and also what they see as Zentyal advantages.

In good faith of a knowledge sharing and collaborative community.

 :) >:( :o ::) :-X :'( hopefully not.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: CNServices on March 19, 2014, 10:00:17 pm
Zentyal Development's current direction is not led by the community, plain and simple. Thus, factually making it not true OpenSource. Ultimately, this discourages community contribution.

Dont get me wrong. I am thankful, as im sure are many others, for the Zentyal project and the efforts of its staff. There just appear to be philosophical disagreements between Development and the community's main contributors.

If we can talk about this without injecting caricatures or a straw man into it, I'd like to pursue this a bit, for the sake of discussion.

In the interest of fairness, in my relatively brief participation here I've met more resistance form the community than from Zentyal staff.The local desktop and a transparent proxy seem to be favored targets for derision, for example, not from the developers, but from vocal community sources. In other words, I'm reluctant to ask even technical questions about either of these things (got bit doing that about monitors) because of the community rather than the developers. I mention that, again, to be fair.

Not that any of the developers helped me with the technical question. Just to be fair.

But what I'm more interested in is your thoughts on what I'll term open-source-open-development versus open-source-closed-development. I'd like to put it that way because Eric Raymond's work is clearly emotive. I'd like to avoid emotive conversation for the moment.

Zentyal strikes me as a classic case of open-source-closed-development. Not that I think Zentyal is literally closed development. The opposite is obviously true if you read about non-staff contributors. The constructive contrast is between sponsor-driven versus community or altruistic development models. I'm connecting closed development with sponsor-driven development.

It might be that as sponsors of an open source server management layer the primary responsibility of Zentyal staff is to listen to feedback on implementation, not direction.

Take the local desktop for example. The history of that feature as I understand it from these forums is that it was a feature adopted at community request. Now it is the object of some community derision. Communities can be fickle about direction. Whom does a development sponsor please?

Sticking with the local desktop example, the community apparently suggested a lighter weight DE, a matter of implementation. The developers adopted the community feedback on implementation and the issue dropped off the map.

Additionally, the true Raymond-style chaos action is happening upstream. Volatility is everywhere--GNOME, Samba, Ubuntu are easy examples. If I want to influence ClamAV development do I leverage that desire best by parking myself in the Zentyal forums?

I'm not trying to start an argument. I'm honestly interested in what you think. I have watched this battle play out countless times in various open source projects. Take phpBB as an example, something closer to an altruistic project than Zentyal, where people famously chaffed at the closed development model that characterized phpBB 2. How did changing the development model significantly change phpBB itself for the better?

And so on. Thanks for reading. :)
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 10:36:49 pm
Yeah, I think your right as I never understood the proxy battle. We have both and I prefer the declared mode rather than transparent.

The community needs someone who will ask the community rather than tell the community that has been much of the problem.

The argument seems to of been all those noobs don't know what we know so we best tell them.
The community will never progress with that attitude and it didn't.

The local desktop of a zentyal client distro was just a stupid waste of time. It narrows and creates support requirements from a small community.
This is when there are a plethora of desktops to choose from.
How it actually got going and got so much space on the forum was a classic example of how unbalanced the community was in favor of us who no better.

I can't be critical enough of how much time was wasted on that whilst we don't have tools to make leading client distro a doddle to install.

The amount of posts after it was foisted onto us with many yelling and saying no to no obvious reason points a finger at some people with elbow arse problems.

Still saying all this, if it has to be a time, where we do discuss, do involve, do get some idea's, work together then now as at any stage could be a good time to try.

We could all list a series of disasters but maybe lets just go forward.

There was a huge problem in that with the likes of Sam Graff and Christian there was a huge amount of knowledge and the community charter of meritocracy seemed to be valid.
In other cases it was absolutely obvious this wasn't the case and I think this dissuaded people.

Personally I think titles and controllers are half the problem, always have.

Thing is the tools of this forum are very limited and if you really wanted to push the boundaries of the Bazaar and open contribution there is no value to posts and they just get lost in chronological time.

As a Bazaar platform there is a Northern English technical term "Its Shit". But I guess we will have to make the best of it.

Thanks for your reply as its nice to know that you are community minded.

 
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: robb on March 19, 2014, 11:01:39 pm
Any objections of splitting off the discussion from CNservices' post down so we can discuss this in a proper way and not go offtopic in a 'goodbye' thread?
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 11:11:48 pm
No, don't do it.

Post on purpose. The meritocracy and SADFL was a good idea. Thing is on the forum at least we never seemed to have a leader who inspired and acted the SADFL.

Julien is the man. I have said to much and alienated myself I will join in and help.

What we need to do is hold our hands up high and say it was a disaster.

We need a controlling vote and input from a very talented guy.

Just a little time every now and then to over rule, mentor and maybe set targets.

To much angst for anyone else to leave. So your not going, neither am I.

We need a new start and it needs some Zentyal involvement.

Leave it at that.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: N. Balauro on March 19, 2014, 11:21:38 pm
I agree with both CNServices - that the Community is essentially misrepresented, and with StuartNaylor - that the obvious solution is a refinement to the forums - a refinement that NUTURES contribution.

In regards to perceived community resistance. Just as StuartNaylor suggests, I attribute this to the current design of the community forum. Contributors such as Christian simply burnt out after their continuous contributions were undermined by the flawed design of community interaction/intercommunication. How many times is the guest noob gonna come in and ask the same questions that were previously solved via community contribution? If contributor's contributions aren't being acknowledged why continue contributing?

Just a final note for pondering before i gotta run... Acknowledgement needs to not only stem from other community members, but also from Dev. Neither of which is in place with the current design of the forum. Contributors such as Christian essentially become Free Zentyal Support Desk until they burn out....
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 11:29:14 pm
N. Balauro very well spoken. Think its needs a new era of community members.

Please get involved. Sorry for being blunt. If Zentyal put in the effort they will reap the rewards.

I am not a fan of titles but if you are up for it put your names forward.

I think Nachio was run off his feet at the time. So we can never ask for a lot of involvement but community governance that is impartial is essential.

Hopefully you never know but I do hope if things change maybe Christian will make an appearance.
 
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: nachico on March 19, 2014, 11:44:46 pm
It's been a long time since I don't post in the forum (you can't imagine how busy life gets when trying to change the world). I am really sorry to hear that Christian has left the forum, but it is somehow expected as he was not really interested in MS-compatible technology.

There has been a lot of discussion inside and outside the forum regarding the evolution of Zentyal to become a drop-in replacement for MS servers: some people love it and some other hate it. From my point of view, this is the legacy we will leave to our children, to make the world a better place. Let me explain myself: most companies in this world use Exchange as their email server; the percentage of companies using Active Directory for identity management is even bigger. These users have no other choice, so they are locked into a monopoly and depend on Microsoft's decisions. Zentyal is providing for the first time a true alternative, breaking the monopoly and offering freedom of choice. But not only so, we are providing the source code and the right to modify it, giving effectively the control on this freedom of choice to the people, so that we make sure that there will never be a monopoly again. And this is only the start.

I understand if this approach does not fit many power users. But I know as a fact that this is going to make so many lives so much better, that it is a price I am ready to pay.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 19, 2014, 11:51:36 pm
My opinion is 100% agreement.

Community Nachico. Team of shit hot talented developers. Superb product. Pants community forum.

Invest some time and effort into the community platform and take a chance on the results.
 
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: N. Balauro on March 20, 2014, 02:01:05 am
Even better... Allow the community to be the centerstage of design for this refined  "platform". Dev staff members aswell as community members could contribute as much, or little, as they want to this redesign -in open community fashion. Let community contributions develop this platform (much of this is happening already to some extent), but allow "Zentyal" to be the editor in chief and endorse the design. This is the perfect project to reap the benefits of, and exemplify, "OpenSource" in its purest.

A side note about M$ drop in intentions... The subversive intentions of "Zentyal" to de-monopolize M$ technologies are pure and very agreeable. However, by attempting to "Drop-In" for M$, "Zentyal" has thus far been embracing M$ desgin practices, logically inheriting its flaws aswell.  This, among fundamental contradictions such as designing via opensource for a non opensource consumer, are a major point of impedence both for the community and "Zentyal".

Who's to say one has to obey the law of "OpenSource"? No one. However, the most basic intention of being OpenSource is to have the same successful results of projects such as Linux - not to follow some OpenSource Religion.

Basically what we are saying here is this: We are a sample of the many excited about this thing called "Zentyal".  We want this project to be majorly successful. We think the motivation to demonopolize M$ via OpenSource is great, and highly agreeable! However, we do not think 'Zentyal' is integrating OpenSource to its fullest, thus detracting from the potential of this project. We do want to help though! Allow us first to help design a "Zentyal" driven platform, that will utilize the community to the fullest in achieving the ultimate goal of "Zentyal".
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: CNServices on March 21, 2014, 01:04:44 pm
However, the most basic intention of being OpenSource is to have the same successful results of projects such as Linux - not to follow some OpenSource Religion.

I think it was in the film Revolution OS that Linus Torvalds said something to the effect that he hoped people used open source software not because of some sort of idealism but because it was better software.

That point of view has consequences. It doesn't follow from the success of the Linux kernel that it serves as a blueprint for success. If that were true, things would be different. For instance, the premise of Revolution OS would have come true. In that film, released in 2001, Eric Raymond tells the delightful story of meeting a Microsoft executive in an elevator and telling him, "I'm your worst nightmare." But has that really been the case these years later?

Another consequence is that there can be a difference between open source source software and the best software for a given task. Characterizing people who use Access as sheep or whatever, just as an example, isn't useful.

Any efforts to paint the open source software movement as a monolithic achievement and point of view are also betrayed by Linus's observation. It's clear that central figures in the free and open source movements are not all on the same page (or there wouldn't be two movements). I think Richard Stallman prioritizes things differently from Bruce Perens. Even if not, compare the Zentyal and Trisquel communities to see the difference I'm talking about. Maybe I'm safer saying that Zentyal's CEO looks at things differently from Richard Stallman.

In any case, Zentyal both as a product and as a project inherits all that back story, for good or ill. Only chaos knows. Debian and Ubuntu are distinct because the back story matters, or at least is presumed to matter. So it's hard for me to imagine, much less know, what pure open source outcomes even look like.
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: StuartNaylor on March 21, 2014, 06:55:35 pm
Well I have been thinking about it and the bazaar platform I am giving it a go.

Had to think of something I could do so its my old favorite Samba4.

Started last night so a little tired. Done my sourceforge thing first https://sourceforge.net/projects/samba4all/

The collaborative web site knowledge platform will be up after I have had some sleep.

Its more just to demonstrate how opensource in isolation of opensource is one of those islands of excellence but unfortunately an Island.

Its no religion to me, apart from I joke about our Lord Eric, Linus and the holy stallman. :)

Right bed...
Title: Re: Goodbye Christian
Post by: N. Balauro on March 21, 2014, 08:12:18 pm
@CNServices: I understand your perspective and it is valid. I would like to point out however, It appears my usage of "success" has been interpreted, as results of wealth only. The intended definition of "success" I was attempting to convey was more related to "the correct or desired result of an attempt", and achieving valuable non-wealth results, aswell.

@StuartNaylor: Im looking forward to seeing how you implement your ideas! Subscribed to updates.
Title: Au revoir Christian
Post by: Marcus on March 29, 2014, 04:12:04 pm
Et à la prochaine

(possiblement sur un autre projet)

 :)

Marcus