Topic: Its True E-Smith dies with RedHat

[Bill]

Devinfo list members,

As has been hinted on this list, we are following Red Hat's lead with
Fedora and turning the SME Server developer release over to the community.

I don't think that this should come as a big surprise to anyone who has
followed developments within the industry or on this list over the past
years.

As was eloquently stated on the list earlier today, Mitel is a
commercial enterprise and has decided to focus our developers on our commercial products. Some of our developers may choose to continue to stay involved with whatever community effort emerges, doing so on their own time and outside of their regular responsibilities within Mitel.

As noted below, we will be continuing to develop applications on top of our commercial release and as we make changes to GPL components we will
release them to the community just as any other developer should do.

What does this mean for the SME Server unsupported developer release,
this list, e smith.org, our commercial products, etc.?

Read on...

* SME Server 6.0 unsupported developer release

We will be preparing a 6.0 unsupported developer release in the next week or two that will essentially be 6.0beta3 plus a few recent security updates. This will be the
last "official" unsupported developer release that we have planned. Any future releases are really up to you. (For all of you who have been asking for a roadmap in the past, now is your chance!)

* e-smith.org bulletin boards

We have already
received agreement from the ontribs.org staff that they could host the forums there and we had tentatively agreed to prform the move next week. (I was actually waiting to announce this until fter the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and after I had received confirmation from the contribs.org folks that they were all set up their end)

* devinfo mailing list

Given that the development will be taking place utside of Mitel, we
would like to see another host found for this mailing list. The contribs.org staff has indicated their willingness to host the list and we will continue to maintain this list until such a list exists.

* Bug reporting

Again, as this will now be a community project, we are expecting that the community will start up a bug reporting database. Mitel Networks will continue to accept bug reports to smebugs@mitel.com, and will continue to process them there until an alternative system is running, and will thereafter forward new bug reports to the new system.

Commercial customers should, of course, continue to contact their reseller for support as they do today.

* Copyright and licensing

The code in the SME Server remains copyright Mitel Networks and is released under the GNU General Public License. The GPL provides you with the freedom to modify the software as you choose, but also comes with the requirement to share those modifications. We trust that those people who derive software from the SME Server will comply with the requirements of the GPL.

* 6000 MAS commercial release

We currently use the 6000 MAS base operating system as the base for several solutions including the 6010 Teleworker Solution, the 6040 Office Server Suite and 6042 Managed VPN.

Given that the 6040 Office Server Suite and 6042 Managed VPN are both mature, stable, robust products that have the range of functionality that our customers have asked for, we have moved our developer focus to the Teleworker Solution and several other upcoming products. At the current time we do not have any plans to further develop the 6040 and 6042 packages. We will continue to fix reported bugs and issue security updates for supported releases, but do not plan on adding additional features until we are presented with appropriate business reasons to do so.

In regions where we currently have trainedresellers who can support
the products, we will continue to sell the 6040/6042 products and
support existing customers.

Development continues strongly on our 6010Teleworker Solution and other telephony-focused products and sales continue to be available globally.

If you have further questions about our commercialproducts, please contact me directly.

I am extremely pleased to see the comments posted both here and already
over at the contribs.org forum and very much look forward to seeing whatwill evolve out of this community.

If you have questions about all of this, please do let me know.

Unfortunately, I will be offline for the next four days celebrating
U.S. Thanksgiving but I will certainly review comments when I return Monday, December 1st.

Thank you all for the efforts you have put into the SME Server over
the many years and I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Regards,

Dan

- --
Dan York, Director of Product Management, Mobility Solutions
Mitel Networks Corporation

[Byte]

That doesnt mean its dead!!!

[Greg]

Thank you Dan for this information

We've been expecting this..
It's up to us now...
Let's go to Contribs.org to continue this great product.

Cheers

Greg

[John Willby]

Isn't it more a case of "the king is dead - long live the king".

[tobyd]

looks like it is time for a fork - any takers???
personally, i hate contribs.org - i think it is hard to find anything, looks unprofessional & dreadful, has too many links that lead nowhere or are dead and so on...
there must be something better?

[Karl]

tobyd...... I thought I was the only one who thought this....I'm with you

[rick]

I would have to agree that contribs.org will need a makeover if it is to be a success. Poor navigation, dead links etc are all frustrating at best.

[tobyd]

no you are not the only one....
i am sorry to have had to say that, i appreciate the work contribs.org have done but i do not think it is good enough for such a good product - i feel we would loose a lot of good development and users (who provide the ideas for dev&contibs) if we as a community were to rely on contribs.org as our main base of support & communication.

I don't want to put their work down but there has to be something better?
If not I would be willing to develop a site & donate space and i'm sure lots of others would too.
I have been dependant on e-smith and these forums & contribs for my business for the past 3 years but as I am not known here I am not sure if I would be trusted to take this on.
Maybe others who are interested in keeping this alive should speak up and we all create a wishlist for what is needed and put a few demos together that can be put to a public vote???

[Harold]

tobyd wrote:

> I have been dependant on e-smith and these forums & contribs
> for my business for the past 3 years ...

Well, you (and no doubts lots of others) should have been partners with
e-smith/Mitel, shouldn't you, so some of your profit went to support development ...

H.

[tobyd]

Harold wrote:
>
> tobyd wrote:
>
> > I have been dependant on e-smith and these forums & contribs
> > for my business for the past 3 years ...
>
> Well, you (and no doubts lots of others) should have been
> partners with
> e-smith/Mitel, shouldn't you, so some of your profit went to
> support development ...
>
> H.
I was a partner/reseller for the second of these 3 years but because of the pricing and some local issues did not feel that it added value to my clients so decided not to continue being a partner!
Harold, are you a partner or reseller? - different argument for a different forum...

any constructive ideas here?

[John Willby]

Hi

Well I am glad somebody has said that. Maybe the dev guys are listening?

I think it will take a while to get things setup.

I personally have a few ideas I would put forward.

I think many of the addons that a lot of people on this list use (the GPL ones) could use with being finally intergrated into the system.  This could be a short term goal that can be achieved with the current version 6 that will be released.

It would be great if it were possible to intergrate some sort of anti-virus and spam filtering into the distro. So these things load and come pretty much setup and ready to go. I personally, as somebody who is by no means experienced, found them quite difficult to install (specifically spamassasin and especially Clamav). As a aspect of the admin side I would like a place for the monitoring and tweaking of these things in the server manager.

I would be like a pig in mud if that were to happen.

Also there are things like ntop or something similar that I would like to see as an option and I am sure many others can pipe up with their own favourite contribs.

I think the user manager panel is another contrib that ought to be a more permanent fixture.

In the longer term I would like to see a better way of updating or installing  programs. I am a mandrake user (sorry!) and I like their urpmi system for installing rpms. Can't we get something like that which sorts out dependencies etc...

Just my 2p worth.

[Karl]

I seem to recall a few years ago, there was a breakaway from "e-smith", that had great ideas and possabilities. It died... and was never heard of again.....I can only hope we're not heading down the same path...

[Shane]

Whatever community evolves from this situation, they need to take a look at how other such forks have succeeded...
Postnuke and IpCop for example.

Sure they have had their tribulations, but look at the results...

[Steve Brock]

I can volunteer some server space for a new project. Should I throw something up temporary (like forums for example) to discuss possibilities and ideas?

[tobyd]

excellent steve, good to see someone else take an interest here...
before anybody sets anything up maybe we should have a discussion here on features wanted/needed for a site to take on hosting of contribs, howtos, support forums and so on...

so any ideas?