Does Scalix pay a licensing fee to the devil (Microsoft)?

[knobby]

I have been looking online today for resources on getting Scalix to work and I found an article that mentioned Scalix and Xandros making a deal with the Microsoft to pay them a licensing fee for Scalix. Is this true?

[ls-al]

what answer do you expect without mentioning the source?
I can not read anything about "devils" here: http://www.xandros.com/xandrosandmicrosoft.html

And I am pretty sure that the knowledge of Microsofts Outlook Exchange Protocol will be really helpful for Scalix.

[knobby]

I guess that means the answer is yes. That's unfortunate. I'm sure it's possible they will help you improve your product, but I can't see it being a gain over the amount of community support you loose with the bad publicity this type of deal causes.

[Valerion]

Can you please clarify your lose statement? Since the announcement was made in June/July (IIRC) I have actually seen the amount of messages on the forum increase, not decrease.

I can only see things like AS OTA a benefit. If you do not offer it, you cannot compete with them in the market, and if you reverse-engineer it you either get in trouble when the protocol changes without notice, or Microsoft launches a patent lawsuit against you.

[knobby]

Posts on the forum and an actually community are two totally different things. I see a lot of posts on the forum from people having problems with the software, and not very many replies.

[a.schild]

I see it as a gain for Scalix if they have access to the MS Exchange protocol and can implement it on the serverside.

With this almost all connector problems should be gone. (Smartcache, Antivirus, compatibility with third-party plugings, new Outlook versions etc.) Of course we have no statement of Scalix if they will take that road or remain with the current connector. (Which is not bad, but sometimes...)


In the groupware world you only have two options:

1. Make sure MS Outlook works with your product since it's used in most enterprises
2. Make your own "Outlook" and find the community support for it. Like Lotus Notes, Groupwise etc.

When you look at the market, it's clear that Option 1 is more promising. For example if you buy a new mobile phone, it has software to sync with MS Outlook, perhaps for Lotus Notes, Apple iCal and....

Of course I'm not "happy" that someone gives MS money, but if you use MS Office, then you already did this, so why should Scalix not do it also, if they get better interoperability ?


André

[florian]

At this point, no payment is being made to Microsoft for any bit of Scalix software, so if you worry about any of your dollars paid for a commercial Scalix version going to Redmond, I can assure you that that's not the case.

The license agreements we announced for both Active Sync and the OETP protocol have a fee structure associated with it, as is usual for licensing commercial code or protocols.

For ActiveSync, we have also announced that we will launch a product based on the licensed specs. The initial version of this will be available with Scalix 11.4, as an optional, add-on to the commercial versions of the Scalix product, to be licensed from us per wireless user. The licensing cost of this addon includes some fee to Microsoft for the use of their specifications and protocols. For this, you get full assurance of compatibiity with the ActiveSync protocol and compliant devices.

So, as long as you don't buy/license that specific feature from us, there is nothing to be concerned about; if you do, you will actually already have bought into the concept anyway, because you will be using either a Windows Mobile device or a third party device. Third party devices supporting ActiveSync from Palm, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and soon to be Apple with the 2.0 iPhone will contain software involving Microsoft licenses as well, including fee structures agreed on between Microsoft and those vendors.

If we implement OETP to support Outlook without a connector, the same would apply here. At this point, we haven't finally taken any decision on whether and when we move from the connector to a OETP-based solution and whether such a solution would fully replace the connector or also be offered as an optional alternative. The discussion in this thread is relevant for making those decisions.

Again, I don't see a showstopper impact on community use, because all of this is only relevant for you if you're using Outlook, in which case you're already licensing software from Microsoft anyway.

In any case, we are not planning to make any core part of Scalix dependent on any of those licensed specifications and we are committed to offer free versions of Scalix without any material licensed from Microsoft in the future; this includes our free Community Edition product.

The financial details of all these agreements are all under non-disclosure, so please don't start asking about them!

Best,
Florian.

[knobby]

Excellent news Florian! Thank you for the detailed reply.

[TheDude]

Florian,

I need a bit of confirmation. You said Active Sync will work in 11.4 but since Active Sync (wired to an Outlook client) has been working fine since version 9 of Scalix (maybe further back, but 9 is when I started) I assume you are talking about Over the Air (I will now call it OTA for the rest of my post).

I am using 11.3 community and have probably about 15 users using windows mobile devices (like the excelent Samsung PDA's, Blackjack 1 and 2, etc.) But, they would have to do wired Actvie Sync to get Calendar items, etc.

Are you saying these guys would be able to see Calendar data OTA?

Are you going to have a 5 free deal for community for this feature like you do now for the connector?

This is an exciting new feature, I hope I understand this correctly, please reply!

Thanks,

The Dude

[florian]

The Dude,

correct, Active Sync as mentioned in this context is the OTA version of it. From a technology point of view, the two methods have nothing to do with each other, however, they share the same goal and MSFT has opted to call them the same for marketing reasons. The one is sometimes called Exchange Server Active Sync and sometimes OTA.

As discussed previously in this thread, our implementation will be based on specifications licensed under commercial terms from Microsoft; the license includes royalties to the licensor. Therefore, we're not able to provide no-cost licenses for the module and the functionality will only be available as an optional commercial per-user addon for SBE and EE.

Best,
Florian.

[TheDude]

Florian,

It might be too late to add it to 11.4, however, I think you should consider adding the ability to add OTA Active Sync licences to the Comunity edition as a "on the fly" upgrade on a per user basis.

I think you could sell more of these licences if you opened it up as a posiblity for your large community edition base (like me!). It would also be a way to "lock in" these customers who would not want to walk away, now, since they have put some money into it.

Thanks,

The Dude

[florian]

The Dude,

technically it's too late, however I would not support such a move and I don't think we can/will do it.

1. Community Edition is provided under a certain license construct, with no support under SLA and somewhat relaxed platform requirements. Those don't go well with a commercial add-on.

2. Community Edition is defined to be a free product. At the heart of it, it's a free email server with POP/IMAP capabilities and a very advanced webmail component, plus open-standards based interfaces like CalDAV, for unlimited users. We also provide a couple free Premium Users as an addon, but as already explained during the 11.3 licensing discussion when we reduced their number from 25 to 10, they were never meant to be at the heart of the design of CE - they are an additional giveaway from our commercial side of things, to demonstrate what the commercial product is capable off and at the same time to service SOHO-type businesses in providing them with a full solution. We can easily do that because all the software is ours and there are no 3rd-party licenses included. Obviously we can't do this with stuff from others.

3. It wouldn't make much sense from a product perspective either. If you are on CE and need wireless users, you should go commercial. The SBE-20 product we are offering doubles the number of premium users to 20 at a USD/EUR 600 price point; it also adds full text attachment indexing, Active Directory integration and integrated deleted item recovery, plus some formal support, so this is good value for money. And, if you compare this relatively small amount with the cost of wireless users when you include the monthly plans, devices, etc., it is almost neglible from a total cost perspective, i.e. from what a customer is willing to pay for a full wireless server. The per-user cost is way less than Microsoft's SBS, which is already a heavily discounted product. An installation that uses a number of wireless users with active sync is not your typical community user, this is a commercial organisation making and spending money. And where this involves our stuff, we want a share, and I think that's fair.

BTW, the upgrade from CE to SBE is seamless and can be archieved by loading a license key at runtime, even without the users having to log out and back in again. No efforts here, either.

So I think we should - and will - leave it as is.

Hope this makes sense to you,
Florian.

[kcsc]

Florian,
Are there any tentative pricing schedules for the OTA in 11.4?

[florian]

Unfortunately, not yet - we'll release a public beta pretty soon, then things will be finalized. It will be competitively priced, though, as much I can promise.

Florian.

[joako]

I think the point TheDude was making, and I'll agree I have setup scalix community for some smaller clients in the same boat, that many people can live without AS support if their only choice is upgrade to Enterprise Edition AND pay for those licenses, vs just pay a per-device license fee and keep the community edition. The big IT houses are going to be using Exchange anyways those looking for an alternative probably are either 1) the minority, those that just have a personal preference for software that isn't made in Redmond (I'm one of those but...) and those are probably the ones NOT running Outlook and not running Windows Mobile device (I won't part with mine, however) 2) looking for a solution on a budget.

Say the pricing is $50 per device per end use for Enterprise Edition customers I would see it as a **HUGE** selling point for CE if you could just buy those same licenses (and also additional seat licenses for premium users) at the same price with no minimums and no strings attached.

You say Enterprise Edition is a value compared with Microsoft SBS, but SBS includes the Outlook licenses ... well I can't do a price comparison because sometime in the past approx 6 months all pricing details were deleted from scalix.com, but from what I recall smallest edition cost $1500 for 20 users.

SBS is $560 (T72-01411, from CDW, but can find it for <$400) for 5 users + 15 CAL (T74-00001) would run approx $1700 from CDW) = 85/user... less than the cost of an Outlook license.

Scalix works out to be is $144 per user ($45 Scalix) when you consider Outlook costs (543-03007, $99 from CDW). Evolution connector for Scalix is no way on par with using Outlook.

So besides the Microsoft FUD and perceived problems of inter-vendor compatibility there are the costs which are almost identical between products. You might say open and select license get better pricing for Outlook...well those are the shops that are more likely to be licensing the entire Office suite and which are more likely to use large AD forests and use Exchange because "its from the same vendor so it will integrate better"