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Messages - nachico

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76
Hi Sam,

I don't have doubts, just to be clear, just confusion. :)

Perhaps part of the problem is just how I'm reading nachico's announcement. You and I are clearly reading it differently :) . But it's not my purpose to debate nachico's intent, only to point out that the community and the staff apparently can see sentences like, "But we believe that more people, not just the employees of one single company, should have the chance to get involved in the project and have the right to assume responsibilities, give their opinion and help taking decisions" very differently. :)

I don't see the announcement I made as confusing: it is our goal to open up much more to the community and to move to a community-based development model. And we have carried out every single promise that was included in that announce: we have launched the localization team, assigning responsibility over the management of the translation to members of the community who are not employees of our company. We have set a series of rules to manage the different language groups and the whole translation team in a similar manner as it is handled in other communities. And we are planning to continue with the following team and continue opening up.

Maybe the confusion came from the fact that you expected it to be a faster process. So did we. We expected to receive a more general support to the idea, and even some excitement, but as you can see my announcement had zero responses. We got some pretty good volunteers for the translation team but only after leading the whole process and being very proactive, so the natural conclusion we drew was that we have to invest a great effort before we can finally have a community-based development model. So, unfortunately we will open up slower than expected, with the available energy after having invested the time we need in keeping improving the project and being economically sustainable.

So I just ask that Zentyal staff take that into account as we in the community respond to Zentyal as an open source project and product. I'm not trying to say that the community understanding is the right understanding, only that I think there is some room for us to be legitimately confused about the big picture and the details (so that we can know clearly what our testing experience should look like).

I am very open to any question you want to ask anytime you feel confused about our decisions. In fact, I would be delighted to answer such questions in the forum :-)

For example, to tell potential customers testing Zentyal that bugs they've run across are not as important to fix as the bugs found by existing customers could be sending the wrong message, People most likely are assuming that what they download to test should work exactly as advertised over the short term. To more or less say that the public download can be expected to have bugs and that fixing them may be low priority not only seems to me contrary to the spirit of nachico's announcement (according to my reading :) ), but also to good salesmanship :) .

Well, I don't think that's what Javi meant. We take great care of every bug that is reported and we are eventually going to fix them all. But concerning priorities, when we have to choose between investing our efforts in fixing a bug that helps improve the product and fixing a bug that helps improve the product and the economical sustainability of the project, it is a no-brainer that we should focus first in the later before solving the former, right? Obviously, we are open to get help in debugging or receiving patches and those are very valid (and welcome) ways to accelerate the fixing of a bug.

77
News and Announcements / New forum levels
« on: September 27, 2010, 10:19:15 am »
Hi everyone,

just to let you know that we have replaced the default forum levels with new ones, more Zen-like, that better suit our new name. Also, the default level icon, a star, has been replaced by the yin yang.

It's been quite fun to come up with all the different levels and we have learned quite a lot of Japanese history, oriental philosophy and kung-fu principles (Zen Apprentice, Monk, Warrior, Samurai and Hero). We hope you like them!

78
News and Announcements / Re: The new name for eBox Platform is Zentyal!
« on: September 07, 2010, 12:13:52 pm »
Come on Einar! Zentyal is just a seven-character, easy-to-pronounce name with a mnemonic that makes it easy to remember. I am sure with just a little effort you will learn it! ;)

We have already explained the reasons why we have changed our name and most people have found them very reasonable. Anyway, if you are not convinced yet, just think about Lenovo's announcement a few weeks ago to launch a product called eBox (disclaimer: their announcement and our decision to change our name were totally unrelated events, just pure coincidence). Had we decided to continue with our old name, in a few years or even months we would have ended up spending a lot of our energy in a legal fight for the brand name. And I believe everyone in this forum would prefer us focusing our efforts in making an even better product, don't you think? :)

79
One other item that sorely needs addressing - Adequate, accurate, and up-to-date documentation. While it would be nice to have it when the product is released, if it followed with-in a few days that would be tolerable.
IMHO, complicated, all-in-one products that are released, without adequate, updated documentation, is just as worthless as software that has not been adequately tested/written/documented. A good example of how not to do this, is the 1.5/1.5-1 release that points only to the 1.4 documentation, even though the 1.5 series is clearly heavily modified, screen snapshots dont' match what product screens show, and customer is left to try to figure things out on their own -- you lose customers/prospects that way.

As you should know, and as it is clearly specified in every 1.5/1.5-1 announcement, those are just beta versions, not intended for production environments. You should not use them with your customers.

Keeping the documentation up-to-date is a very time-consuming task and should only be done when it is really needed. At this moment, we are spending a lot of sleepless nights and fun-less week-ends to get the 2.0 doc out as close as possible to the 2.0 release date. Once it is ready, we will still need to translate it to English. We will do our best to have it as soon as possible, but our resources are limited.

80
News and Announcements / Re: The new name for eBox Platform is Zentyal!
« on: August 23, 2010, 04:19:53 pm »
FYI, I just wrote a post in my blog with a few notes about how to pronounce Zentyal.

Cheers,

81
News and Announcements / Re: The new name for eBox Platform is Zentyal!
« on: August 19, 2010, 08:02:18 pm »
I'm completely sure that it's just me, but I'm not sure how to pronounce it ...  :-[

What a disheartening comment ;D Just joking ;) We really thought Zentyal would be easy to pronounce, but anyway, here is a sample:

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php -> select Mike -> write Zentyal -> press speak

It's very cool that the project continues to move forward. It's still my opinion that Zentyal will do more to reshape the small business network landscape than any other single tool. It opens doors to non-Linux professionals if nothing else. Hopefully the new branding and the 2.0 release will fully reward the hard work of everyone on the team!

Thanks! That's a really encouraging comment ;) We do believe so. The 2.0 release is coming with a lot of performance and usability improvements, as well as a lot more stability. Also, we are working hard to offer from Sept onwards training materials that could help Windows sysadmins make a smooth move to Linux through Zentyal. Let's see how it all works out.

82
News and Announcements / Opening up to the community
« on: August 11, 2010, 02:35:20 pm »
As we pre-announced in some posts before in this forum, we are planning to change the way eBox Platform is developed. During the past seven years the project has followed a classic in-house development approach, where a company (us) has taken most of the responsibility. And as eBox Platform is an open source product, it has benefited from the help of a community of users: you :-) The community contributions have been very valuable, specially when it comes to product feedback, localization, testing and debugging. And thanks to all of us, eBox Platform is becoming a real alternative to Windows Small Business Server.

However, during the last few months, quite a bunch of community members have proposed to become more involved in the project, assuming some of the responsibilities that we are doing (or should be doing) now. From the start, back in 2004, we believed this was the right approach: to take the project to a stage where the community can lead its development, a true open source product. And now we think is that moment! Of course this does not mean that we are stepping out. Quite the contrary, our involvement can only increase from now on. But we believe that more people, not just the employees of one single company, should have the chance to get involved in the project and have the right to assume responsibilities, give their opinion and help taking decisions.

So, following the spirit of the Ubuntu community teams we are launching the Localization Team, a combination of language-specific, self-governed groups which will collaborate to achieve native-quality translations of eBox Platform. This team is just the first step towards a true Ubuntu-like community, with boards governing the community and the technical development and specific teams working on particular areas.

In order to coordinate the Localization Team, we have developed an initial set of simple rules which we consider logical and positive for the organization of translation groups. The team consists of a Localization Leader, elected for two years, as well as a Language Leader and a Quality Supervisor for each language, together with any translator who wants to join a translation group. The Localization Team will coordinate through the Forum and language-specific mailing lists and will meet via IRC once every three months to establish goals and take the main decisions. None of these rules are written in stone and we will be more than happy to see groups adjusting their functioning to maximize their own efficiency. Initially Mateo Burillo, from the eBox staff, will take the lead of the Localization Team, but we hope to see soon candidates from the community interested in coordinating the whole team.

So, if you want to help in localizing eBox to your language, you just need to register in our translation platform and start posting. It is advisable to register in the general translation mailing list too, in order to coordinate with other translators. And if you consider becoming Language Leader, do not hesitate to contact Mateo Burillo (mburillo at ebox-platform dot com) so that he can set up the needed infrastructure (mail lists and such).

Feel free to leave any comments to this post!

83
News and Announcements / Changing the name of eBox Platform
« on: August 05, 2010, 04:31:06 pm »
Hi everyone,

I am excited to break the news on behalf of the whole eBox team: We are going to change the name of eBox Platform! And although this is positive news, the decision was not taken lightly nor it has been easy to say goodbye to our former identity and find and embrace a new one. However, we have found that this decision was necessary, and the sooner we took it the better

As you can imagine, any name change is a complex process and there should always be a very good reason to do it. So, why do we do it? Why did we think that eBox is not a good name for us anymore? Well, basically because there is no box! Although our initial idea, when we started with the project seven years ago, was to embed the software in a particular appliance and sell boxes, we soon realized that it was much more interesting to focus solely on the software and develop a well-integrated, semi-automated, versatile open source server.

But this change in our approach has lead to a growing difference between what we do and what our name means. In fact, many people are convinced that we sell boxes when they first hear about us. Only once we explain what eBox really is and what is our subscription-based value proposition, they start to become interested in the product.

We have been thinking about making the change a number of times earlier, but as you can imagine, it is never a good time for something like this. However, during the past year the number of downloads, community members and general interest in eBox Platform has started to grow exponentially and we’ve become even more painfully aware of the faults of our current name. This has made us feel that it is kind of “now or never” momentum, and that the problem will not be solved by waiting longer.

Something that we would like to stress above all, is that only the name changes. We are still the same team, with the same goals, same open source license, and same everything. In fact, we are working on increasing our commitment on open source and adopting a more community-driven development model, but I will come back with that in a different post.

The new name will be made public in a few weeks and there will be additional information regarding the change in the Planet eBox and here in the Forum. Feel free to leave any comments to this post and stay tuned!

Update: It has been disclosed, the new name is Zentyal!

84
Installation and Upgrades / Re: Change logo
« on: June 06, 2010, 10:01:14 pm »
Hi babatt,

we give support for rebranding only for some levels of partners. Of course, as eBox is GPL, you can fork it and change the logo and brand. However, this is rarely a clever decision, apart from being usually highly unethical.

Regards

85
Installation and Upgrades / Re: Does eBox support rebranding?
« on: May 27, 2010, 01:44:04 pm »
Hi alemartini,

thank you for your question. eBox does support rebranding but only for partners and resellers under certain conditions. Let me know whether you have other questions.

Regards,

Ignacio

86
Really interesting topic! I will comment on those posts concerning roadmap and priorities, and leave the topic of revenue model for a different board (there is a whole category in the forum to discuss on services and revenue).

First, thank you for your suggestions. It was really interesting to read all the different opinions on what should be our roadmap for the development of eBox. I agree that at this moment we should focus on completing current functionality and improving stability, usability and disaster recovery. In fact, that is the main focus at this moment. And with the migration to Lucid there is not much space for new modules.

However, we should not stop completely from adding new functionality. It takes several iterations to have a new functionality complete, useful, intuitive and stable. So that's why we are starting to work in HA, as it will not be easy to include it in eBox while maintaining its focus as an integrated server for SMBs. Master-Slave is the first step in that direction but there is still a long road ahead :)

87
Hi flashbios,

thanks a lot for your compliments and kind words. It is really encouraging to hear comments like yours and to confirm that we are on the right path. Thanks! :-)

88
News and Announcements / Re: Usage of eBox Platform
« on: October 15, 2009, 01:40:10 pm »
Hi everyone,

thanks a lot for your votes and your comments. I think this poll was a great success as during the past six weeks more than 10% of the forum members casted their votes.

The poll depicts a community swarming with IT professionals who use eBox in pretty critical environments. I was particularly surprised by the fact that more than 10% use it to deliver services to their customers and around 50% deploy it in their own organizations.

The comments showed also a lot of interest in the master/slave feature already available at 1.3 and some demands on releasing new documentation, which was actually already released and available at http://doc.ebox-platform.com/ There were also some requests about improving usability and having a better backup, which we are currently working on. There seems to be a lot of interest in integrating single sign on in eBox, which is currently not in the roadmap. Anyway, we are taking good note of your suggestions.

I proceed then to close the poll and I will soon open a new one. Thanks again.

89
Spanish / Uso de eBox Platform
« on: August 24, 2009, 05:44:30 pm »
Hola miembros de la comunidad de eBox,

Estamos comenzando una serie de encuestas sobre el uso de eBox Platform con el objetivo de conocer mejor quién usa eBox, para qué, cómo mejorarlo, que características son las más útiles, cuáles faltan, etc.

Estaríamos muy agradecidos de todos aquéllos que pudieran disponer de 30 segundos para responder a esta encuesta y ayudarnos a recoger esta información. Ni que decir tiene que la información recogida será compartida con todos aquéllos que voten. Si tienen sugerencias para nuevas encuestas no duden en dejarlas en los comentarios más abajo.

¡¡Gracias!!  :)

90
News and Announcements / Usage of eBox Platform
« on: August 24, 2009, 05:24:21 pm »
Hi dear eBox community members,

We are starting a series of polls regarding the use of eBox Platform in order to better know who uses eBox, for what, how to improve it, which features are the most useful, which ones are missing, etc.

We would really appreciate anyone spending some 30 seconds to answer the poll and help us gathering this information. Needless to say, the information gathered will be public for all those who voted. If you have suggestions for more polls please just leave a message below.

Thanks!  :)

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