Postby florian » Sat Aug 02, 2008 10:45 am
Hi Robert,
unfortunately the answer is no; one thing is that the license we have from Microsoft is something we have to pay for as well and we are offering the product at a pretty competitive pricing with very little profit on our side actually. We decided to go this way to be able to offer our customers a legally sound solution that is not reverse-engineered and also as full-featured as possible, based on the official specs from them.
Furthermore, please also - as a community user - understand that we have to continue offering some features for the commercial versions only as this is what we ultimately need to survive as a business. We're running a major and complex software development organisation with quite a number of people involved that rely on their paychecks - at the end of the day we need a certain level of commercial success to be able to provide things such as Scalix Community Edition for free, which we will happily continue to do.
We do believe, however, that making a cut with ActiveSync is logical and makes sense - most wireless devices would do mobile email over simple IMAP, which is free. Someone who really needs the additional features of ActiveSync, such as Push Email, wireless real-time calendar and contact synchronisation and system directory access is most likely someone who uses this for work or in a business. I think it is fair that such a person should pay us something, and given that the smallest packaging of Scalix is a Small Business Edition for 20 Users, that, together with ActiveSync, will sell for less than $1000 end user list price, I would feel it's reasonable.
If this is too expensive for you, you may want to look out for hosted Scalix altogether, which more and more hosting providers start offering. This is especially true as with rising energy cost, just running a full-fledged server machine on your own becomes expensive, especially when you add the cost to administer and maintain.....
All good things and sorry not to have better news here,
Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!