Hi Ralf, Hi Thomas, so far I do not have a good gut feeling about the registry and the way it was introduced. But I am still trying to understand things, as I was quite busy and could not answer sooner.
Am Dienstag, 29. November 2005 23:58 schrieb Ralf S. Engelschall: > Yes, David, I know that you and some others would be happy to do that > and you used the OpenPKG Community Feedback in the past for this. > Unfortunately after even 5 years we just received about 30 feedbacks in > total although we asked multiple times to give feedback and tell if one > is an OpenPKG user. Before and after every release we explicitly involve > our users and ask for their feedback. The results you know: mostly no > feedback. I believe that it has other reasons that the feedback form was not used as planned. E.g. I saw the form, but I dislike forms like it so much, that I did not use it, though I am quite happy to give you feedback. > As I said and without kidding, even after five years we have not the > smallest clue how many users we have at all. It could be that we have > lots of users who care but just don't say anything at all because > OpenPKG "just works" for them (which would be cool, of course). Almost all Kolab Server users are indeed OpenPKG users. Kolab Server is not always build on the lasted version of OpenPKG for a variety of reasons. We also can only roughly estimate how many users we have, but there are quite a few. A rough estimation would be a number 100<x<1000. We could be well past 1000, too. You are asking for the number of users. Usually download figures, as flawed as they are, good give you a base to estimate this. > But fully serious: it could be also that we have just 100 users and > our current efforts for establishing additional OpenPKG services are > just a major waste of time and money. My recommendation would be to come worth with why this decision is so time critical. So far it scheds general doubts on the future of OpenPKG. Our experience in the Kolab Project is that we get many people that question our choice of OpenPKG and I expect introducing registration to make it more difficult for us to put forth arguments for it. In some ways the system can be seen as being more restrictive as what some commercial distributors of operating systems do (free and non-free). > As you know, the registration was even pre-announced inside the > OpenPKG Foundation about 2 weeks ago for testing purposes and just two > Foundation members responded at all (one of them were you AFAIK ;-). > Nobody else really cared very much. I unfortunately missed the pre-announced, though I care. One reason why I missed it, is that the internal list has technical posts, which are very uninteresting from the strategic perspective. I expect that this topic was lost in the noise. My suggestion here is to seperate strategic and technical aspects in different mailinglists within the foundation. > So we had to finally activate it for the public to really get the > feedback about it. True, but you also directly inflict the damage, if there is one. > experience with the Community Feedback form and > the various questions on the mailing lists to give feedback definitely > showed that the majority of the users of Open Source software is NOT > willing to give feedback as long as there is no real requirement for it. I think there are many other potential reasons why users do not give feeback. To me personally I have made several bad experiences with contacting OpenPKG, even with important questions. I probably have used the wrong channels, and had a mailinglist access setup problem for a while, but still the experience was bad. Just to give you an idea what I tried to get feedback for a) Bugtracker link not working; Status: Still unfixed, no feedback after three attempts or so. b) Berkeley DB stability decision for OpenPKG 2.4 migration of Kolab. Status: I have had communications with Thomas about this before, but this mail went unanswered and we took a decision without answer. (Maybe because I was not properly subscribed to an openpkg -list.) c) Long term maintenance ideas regarding GNU/Linux Enterprise distributions. Status: I probably will have to resend the email. > Everyone, please do not hesitate to complain, too. We are really > thankful for really every type of feedback, independent whether positive > or negative. Finally pulling your important feedback is why we had to > apply the restrictions. You could have had more feedback from me, if I would have known the right channels, where it would be used for and I would have made good experiences with my attempts. Even if it is only a reply like: Cannot answer right now, but will pick this up when needed. (And then it is picked up eventually.) > But please also try to understand our situation. The future of OpenPKG > strongly depends on whether the OpenPKG project finally knows its > community or not. And the registration is important for this. > I personally think that the free of charge one-time registration should > be no problem at all for any serious OpenPKG user. I doubt it. You now force the Kolab Project to decide if we run a mirror (which you describe as unfair) or force the registration decision on our users. For the Kolab Project this is not a nice situation. Most users would want us as feedback station first and not have a heartbeat with OpenPKG. Complained enough for one post. We have choosen, defended and supported OpenPKG within the Kolab Project, because it is good and we like it. So I want OpenPKG to be nice and healthy and keeping up the good work! Best Regards, Bernhard ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List [email protected]
