I did some checking with the folks internally. While we are still planning to have a VMware image available, the image that's on vmtn is
NOT an official Scalix image. It was put together by a community user and made available. Please see this post
http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4229&start=15.
With regards to your other points...
It's possible for us to be both a community and a commercial release and, for the most part, we're being successful at it.
The concept of "supported" platforms is always a hot topic, everybody wants to use it on their platform of choice.
A supported platform is one that we have run through extensive QA testing and confirmed that there are no surprises in terms of compatibility with a distribution. In the Linux world, this means that we expect certain versions of shared libraries, external third-party apps etc. to be present on a server for us to even start up.
We limit our "liability" to the extent that, if you want to get support, we ensure that the installer will only install on those platforms. We want to concentrate on supporting the Scalix application and not have to debug a customer environment in terms of libraries.
However, we appreciate that there are some community users that want to install on other platforms and, in that respect, we provided manual installation instructions at
http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual_Installation for them to be able to do that. If you search through the forums, you'll find people who have successfully installed on Debian, Ubuntu and some of the other 'unsupported' Suse platforms. Yes, they'll never be able to raise a support case and they accept that.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Dave