Hi,
[Another introduction]
I'm Joseph Cheek, the CEO of Lycoris. I was the one who, on the Lycoris side, had the final yea/nay say to the question "should Lycoris involve itself with contribs.org and the SME server?" As you can tell, that answer was affirmative
.
I'll be popping in and out, although you probably won't hear as much from me as you will from people like Mike, Rus, Robbie, Larry, and so on.
Since I'm here, I'll answer a couple of questions:
It is somewhat confusing at this point where the Lycoris team wants community development discussions to take place. You have opened discussions on this forum. You have opened discussions on the developers mailing list. You have opened discussions and directed people to visit the Lycoris greenhouse at lycoris.org. You have directed people to directly e-mail Lycoris staff.
Please clarify a single location where Lycoris wants SME Server community development discussions to occur.
Technical questions about packages, upgrades, or any other software issues should probably be made on the development list. Questions such as "how does Lycoris' involvement with with contribs.org and the SME server affect the product in general, or this community?" can best be handled here in the forums.
I can tell you all a little about the nature of the deal between Lycoris and RSI. When we were looking at your product and your community, we thought both might be a good fit for Lycoris. We are very community-oriented and we also have a strong desire to enhance our product line. So both were appealing, but the question arose of how to get involved. We saw that there were requests for some type of Linux organization to get involved and provide leadership, and we thought we could fit the bill nicely.
As a corporation, the standard thing to do in this case is perform either an acquisition or a merger. Neither really made sense in this case, since contribs.org isn't a company, and we want to join your community and help extend the product, not just say "we bought you, now we own you". That didn't seem right.
So we made a compromise. The closest thing to any corporate sponsorhip of contribs.org and the SME server was Jeff and RSI, so we approached him. We told him we wanted to provide leadership and direction for SME server, keep the contribs.org community, and also turn SME server into a product that Lycoris could sell. Of course we could have taken the code under the GPL and just made our own product, but that wouldn't have been a community-oriented thing to do.
Jeff at RSI and we at Lycoris entered into a deal where Lycoris would give commercial sponsorship to the existing product and the existing community. He would help show us the ropes, making sure that we knew how to both handle the product technically as well as ensure we didn't violate the trust that the community had already placed in RSI, Mitel, e-smith, and others in the past. We would in turn devote development, marketing, and sales resources to SME server, and try to make the contribs.org community feel like a welcome part of the Lycoris family.
If everything worked like we planned, Lycoris would have a great product, make money [which of course we need to do], enable our resellers and partners to make money, and help the many people and customers out there have a great and inexpensive server product that they could deploy with confidence. Additionally, we could do this without violating or alienating the existing contribs.org community and people who had already deployed SME servers.
At this point we are putting heavy development resources into SME server and expect to have a release soon that includes updated security fixes, suggestions from the community, and the ability to have the necessary commercially-backed support that is vital for corporate deployments. With the help from Jeff, RequestedDeletion, and all of you in the community, we believe we can pull this off.
Thanks!
Joe
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