critique on contributor edition

It’s good to see that you’re actually listening to the user community. Thanks for that. And it’s appreciated. But I feel I have to jump through many hoops to be even considered for this version. That’s a pity. Really.
The news is fresh so I’m still contemplating. But to be honest this is not a very tempting ‘offer’. And why a license for 20(!) users, when all we - myself and other happy Zarafa users in the “Bye Zarafa…” thread - were asking for was some kind of personal license, or even just a paid for single license?
To be continued.

fbartels

Hi @vco1 ,

first of all thanks for your feedback. Since I don’t think the announcement post is the right place I have moved your post into a dedicated thread and closed if for comments (while also deleting the "thank you by @Merlin2104).

@vco1 said in critique on contributor edition:

And why a license for 20(!) users

this is simply because this is the minimal oder size for the Kopano Pro Edition, which gives you all of the features you could possible want including files for team, webmeetings and even the archiver.

@vco1 said in critique on contributor edition:

I feel I have to jump through many hoops to be even considered for this version

I still don’t get the “many hoops” part. Creating lots of very small invoices is not economic for us. Instead of asking money we therefore looked for other values to be exchanged. And what we really do want to have more from is release feedback, which seems to be a good possibility here. And if you come across a possibility to spread the word about Kopano (and of course you see it fit to do so), even better.

In any case: its an offer and you do not need to take it. The other possibilities is to stay with the nightly releases or buy a subscription (which according to the mentioned thread was you intention all along).

mcostan

Personally (and I am presently running with the nightly community edition myself) this goes well above anything I was expecting.

What Kopano is doing is essentially giving you the software completely free, in all the possible functionality.

And all they are asking is for you to help where you can.

To be honest it is much better than I was ever expecting because I thought that even just the community nightly builds would have been enough.

I am not aware of any other email / collaborative suite like Kopano that presently does this. Without going into the details of all other comparable products, which to be honest I think are a lot inferior, none of them gives you access to every single bit of their functionality. By all means do let me know if you find any.

P.S. I have no affiliation to Kopano / Zarafa whatsoever but I am merely a community user and I try to help where I can, reporting bugs etc. etc.

khung

I can understand why vco1 (and maybe others) may not be satisfied with the contributor edition.

Some people are happy with the community packages. These are good if a person has the time to test and is not too concerned about getting the latest security patches.

The contributer edition seems to be targeted towards people who have time to spend on promoting or testing Kopano. Again, this is a good deal if a person has the time to spend on that.

There are people on the other thread (like me) who meet the following criteria though:

Think that paying 75€/year is expensive for a non-business purchase
Don’t have the time to test the community packages every time they want to upgrade
Don’t have the time to contribute to Kopano (whether through bug-reporting, patches, translation, etc) or to promote it on social media
Do want to pay some percentage of the minimum 75€ cost in lieu of #2 or #3.

I think that Kopano is trying to reach a compromise here with the contributor edition, perhaps because they are not able to change their invoicing/licensing infrastructure to handle different types of licenses. My concern is how many people would actually sign up for the contributor edition. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am not tempted by the offer as I do not have the time to contribute to stay in such a program.

As Felix suggested, I have the option of going with the nightly releases or buying a subscription. I guess for those people like me or vco1, those are the only options for now.

fbartels

Hi @khung ,

I mean you could also wait for a wider dowstream adoption. The Debian guys are already quite busy (and we’ll be in the next Debian version) and openSuse has packages as well.

See https://wiki.debian.org/Groupware/Kopano and https://kopano.com/kopano-opensuse-yes-open/