Some clarifications - we do in fact own the contribs.org site. You'll see the change in ownership reflected shortly.
We're also committed to the community spirit. You'll notice we're asking questions, getting to know people, and Jeff and RequestedDeletion are continuing to show us the ropes.
We'll be discussing the roadmap in more detail after a bit here. Remember that there are many of you for us to get to know, but there are few of us for you to get to know. This process takes a bit of time. As Monkey pointed out, the templating system will be in full force. We'll also be discussing the CentOS movement and where it takes us. There's been significant work done on that platform, and it's a good basis to move forward.
We'll be continuing to ask questions. Feel free to introduce yourself. Send me a private message or drop me an e-mail (Rus AT Lycoris DOT com). We're pretty accessible. We're going to be doing the same thing we've done at our company, and that's have a positive influence.
Lycoris always respects the GPL and any license for that matter. As we're a commmercial company, we deal with both Open Source and commercial licensing on a daily basis. We do some code as GPL, other code is proprietary. This will continue. GPL can go into both free products as well as commercial, but so can proprietary code.
One person asked why we have a 45 day Evaluation Edition of Desktop/LX. That's simple. Just as Red Hat and others do, we have copyrighted and trademarked graphics, etc. Those we can put restrictions on. That's part of why we do that. The Community Edition of SME Server will be unsupported, and the commercial edition will be supported. Not a big issue there. We build upon Open Source, but we don't exclude commercial possibilities.
A good example is btX2 in Desktop/LX. It's a commercially licensed application from Bitstream. It gives Desktop/LX better font handling than anything else on the market. It's in the retail version, it won't be in our Evaluation Edition of Desktop/LX. The two can coexist quite nicely. The Evaluation Edition is there to see if it installs on your system, if you like the layout, like the available packages, etc. It's a pretty simple philosophy. You get more by paying for the commercial product.
The bottom line is that Lycoris is interested in the community, excited at all the possibilities, and we're committed to turning out quality products. We're here to help, to listen, and to help shape the direction of the product.
Abe brought up a point in one of the comments earlier. We're going to be following in the same vein as before - making the final decisions as to how things progressed, what contribs are good enough for the final release, what new features will be added, what apps need upgrading, and so on. Monkey has been doing some discussion of Anaconda and its patches, for instance. We'll always be looking to the community for such things.
We also will be looking to GPL developers to assist with development as well as participation by community members for beta testing, bug fixes, minor mods, etc. Jeff is involved daily on this. We're listening to understand both past and present direction.
Don't look for radical changes - we're just looking to continue development and implement positive changes.
Rus
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