On Thu, Dec 08, 2005, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> [...]
> 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.
Well, you see, you are a classic user yourself, Bernhard: in theory you
are happy to give feedback but practically you have not done it as you
dislike feedback forms. That's the reason why we unfortunately had to
use some more mandatory approaches...
> [...]
> You are asking for the number of users.
> Usually download figures, as flawed as they are, good give
> you a base to estimate this.
Unfortunately, not really. We tried this multiple times but because of
mirrors and proxies the numbers are such extremely distorted that even
an estimation is too far away from the reality.
> > 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.
The decisions are such time critical simply because Thomas and I (the
main driving horses behind OpenPKG) are still under heavy personal time
pressure as our full manpower sponsoring for OpenPKG (which was the
equivalent of a full-time job until now) is terminating and to protect
the future of OpenPKG we finally have to make decisions now. And those
decisions unfortunately depend on whether the community is large and
diverse enough or we would just waste lots of personal time and money.
> 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.
No, I see no real reason why your Kolab users _HAVE_ to register as
OpenPKG users, although it would great for us. But you are using just
a subset of OpenPKG for Kolab and for your users OpenPKG is just a
sub-technology. Your users feel they are Kolab users and not OpenPKG
users, so they will obviously refuse to register with OpenPKG, of
course. That's ok.
> 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).
Restrictive? Hmmm. Everything which is required is a simple registration
with name and email address. For any really _serious_ user this is not
really some sort of a restriction. It is just fair that if someone gets
resources fully free of charge that he at least tells the giver who he
is. Open Source software is not about downloading resources anonymously,
although we are used to this circumstance for most of the provided
resources. Open Source is about software freedom in the meaning of
non-discrimination of users and the possibility to review the source
code. For OpenPKG and its extremely liberal BSD-style distribution
license it is even a lot more, too...
> [...]
> Just to give you an idea what I tried to get feedback for
> a) Bugtracker link not working; Status: Still unfixed, no feedback
> aafter three ttempts or so.
Accepted. It is a shame that we still have no bug tracking database
running again. The problem is that after Jitterbug and RT failing
horribly (have just one bot which fills your database with 10000 tickets
and both systems are effectively dead and unusable -- RT even nearly
impossible to easily resurrect at all) we really hate mostly all those
systems and the way they are implemented. But we still have this on
our TODO list as we really need such a system again, of course.
> 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.)
Sorry, I don't know the details here, so cannot say anything.
> c) Long term maintenance ideas regarding GNU/Linux Enterprise distributions.
> Status: I probably will have to resend the email.
Here I don't know your question, but in general we usually support those
distributions for which inside the OpenPKG Foundation we have both a
valid license, a hardware (physical or virtual) and at least someone
who maintains this setup. So, for instance RHEL3 we kicked out as our
license expired, nobody donated a renewal and the underlying machine was
already more reasonably used with RHEL4.
> [...]
> > 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.
> [...]
Wait, wait. Kolab uses a *sub-set* of just about 50 OpenPKG packages.
First, you don't need a full-size OpenPKG mirror for this. Making your
sub-set of OpenPKG packages available to everyone on your server in the
form of a your "Kolab distribution" is both fair, license compliant and
fully ok from my point of view. Second, as I said, your Kolab users
don't _have_ to register with OpenPKG. We would like that you tell them
that in order to support OpenPKG they _should_ register, but there is no
requirement.
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
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