Gordon Rowell wrote:
I stand by that policy and it's true of most other vendors. We provideAnd so, Gordon, I can only assume that you'd be more than happy to provide all the salient information and documentation to devinfo to allow SME to support third-party blades, as has been promised for *years* now, right? ;-)
developer previews which show what is likely to be in the coming
release. The roadmap for future releases is influenced by many factors,
internal and external.
The best way to get your feature on that roadmap is to contribute
packages which are sufficiently developed to easily integrate - Dan
Brown's IMP/horde/turba contribs are one such example - they slotted
into 5.5 with minimal integration effort. I know you want better LDAP
integration. So do we, but it's more likely to happen if you contribute
the code in a close to production ready state. Why don't you start up
an LDAP integration project on devinfo?
Seriously, though, this is a pretty dysfunctional open source development community. If Mitel wants to develop SME in secret and then release it when it's done, that's their perogative, and I'd be the last to stand in their way. The problem is that there is also this thing (devinfo) that exists with the pretense of being an open development forum, when it is not. The difficulty of developing meaningful and useful, "easiliy integrated" add-ons to fit a secret, moving target of a product have already been mentioned. One of the real sticking areas is that the community really are just glorified guinea pigs - there is almost no way that the community *can* seriously contribute, as your own comment about the predominance of Mitel-developed code attests. I certainly respect the difficulties of basing a commercial product on open source (especially GPL) code, but that's a choice that was made long ago. Other companies have made this work well, and revealed quite a bit of their development roadmap in the process without hurting their commercial opportunities - Sun, Apple, and Netscape come to mind, as does Red Hat itself. I'm also certain that it's in Mitel's best interest to work with the community, not against it, given the current circumstances - SME is far more valuable to both Mitel and the rest of us if it is usable as a platform rather than merely a product. Today, leveraging SME as a platform appears to be something Mitel wishes to reserve for itself.
Further, there is a creeping proprietariness to SME that bothers me, and I suspect, many others. This is revealed in myriad ways, from the continual foot dragging on the blades issue to simply making it difficult to offer alternatives to things that are part of Mitel's service offering, to more subtle things, like the documentation for 5.5 not being readily available in an easily downloadable form, but rather, tied to Mitel's web site as a zillion pages. Eliminating PDF and single big honkin' HTML file documentation formats may not signal hostility for the SME developer and user community, but you have to realize it doesn't buy you any credibility, either. (As a complete aside, if Mitel's service prices were more reasonable (say, what they were under E-smith) I think you'd find a great many more people willing to sign up for service, including myself.)
I for one think that Mitel is not being a particularly good or effective leader in the effort to strengthen a great open source product. And I'd really like to see that change - much more than I'd like to see a fork or an exodus of developers to ClarkConnect, NetMax, Celestix, NetZuno, etc. (You've currently go the most moementum of any of those others - why blow it?) May I suggest we begin here by having someone from Mitel ask the community how the community members would *like* to be able to help? Mitel would, of course, be under no obligation to accept any of those suggestions, but might find it wise to at least seriously consider them...
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