Is anybody home at Scalix?

[KermitTheFragger]

Now that the cat's out of the bag, is there going to be clarity about the open sourcing of scalix ?

I'm not asking/pushing you guys to open source it tomorrow or next week, Perhaps you say its going to be Q4 2011 or perhaps never. But the whole open sourcing thing (and with it the development path of scalix) is kinda of foggy now imho.

[florian]

Kermit,

understand that we should start talking about revised roadmaps and things, however, I'll probably really have to ask for some more time here as we're still working and preparing the details of all that; I guess in a couple of weeks, some more dust will have settled and we can make more precise forward-looking statements .... with the usual disclaimers that is.

Now one thing about your post caught my attention - in how far do you think Scalix' Open Source Strategy and future development path are linked; I'm sitting next to a couple of our developers as I write this and certainly they are pushing the product forward in preparation for the next release scheduled for some time later this quarter; while there are steps planned to be taken, we most likely won't make any progress on the open source side of things in the same timeframe, but we'll come up with both new features and further fixes for bugs and product issues - see the entries with status RESOLVED on the 'Summertime' target in our bugtracking system - so what leads you to believe that there is a strong link or dependency?

Thanks
Florian.

[jared.flannerty]

Long time reader, first time poster. I'm underwhelmed too. Really?!?!?!? Of all the companies out there you had to get bought by Xandros? While there has been a lot of discussion and not every open source zealot likes Scalix's license model, etc. it is much worse to go and make a "deal with the devil" like Xandros did with Microsoft.

Isn't Xandros the same company that bought up the dregs of Corel Linux after that project tanked? How can you hope to compete with Exchange with these clowns as your new owners? Will they even WANT to compete now that they've signed that agreement with Microsoft?

Also very dismaying in the announcement that only 13 people are left at Scalix. Will the last Scalix engineer please turn out the lights on their way out?!?!?! Florian, guess that's you. (By the way, thanks for the help you've given to the community over the years!)

I've been using the community edition for a while at a couple small sites. But now I'm wondering if I should look at other options. Don't want to believe it, but is the writing really on the wall?

--={ Jared }=--

[florian]

Jared,

first of all thanks for your thoughts. Needless to say, I don't fully agree with your logic, for a couple of reasons - however, let's talk about it as I find some of the points interesting and I assume other people will be thinking along similar lines.

- While in general, I don't think in terms of angels and devils when talking about software vendors and I'm neither a big fan of Microsoft's products nor a frequent user of them (Mac guy here), it's impossible to deny that we play in a Microsoft-connected space anyway, in particular given our client environments. The Xandros-Microsoft agreement is mostly about technology exchange and that is something that benefits our customers as well - all our customers use Microsoft products, even though they might have a preference for an alternative server OS and application stack, but they would all agree that better integration with some of their products is what they really want - this is true for coexistence with Exchange server environments as well as better client integration for both Outlook and wireless clients. So what in particular and concrete is it that you believe is bad in the arrangement and agreement?

- I should leave it to some of the Xandros guys to comment on the exact history of this, but the fact that a good amount of Xandros technology comes out of Corel's efforts (as do a number of people at Xandros) is certainly true. Now, spinning out or selling off a product or product line when it doesn't fit your overall portfolio for me is not a sign of weakness or clownship, but rather focus and dedication. As far as I understand that was done when Corel really went back to their roots focusing on application products for the Windows desktop and maintaining a Linux distro at the same type didn't make sense. From my personal experience with current Xandros people they are extremely focused on customer demand, take great effort to create high-quality products that meet the needs of their clientele and I feel good about Scalix becoming part of a solution stack and being homed within an organisation of such great endeavour and talent. Given the time I spent being one of the public faces of Scalix, I'm probably more of a clown than any of them.

- We do compete with Exchange, we do migrate customers from Exchange and we will continue to do so. We also coexist with Exchange. Denying any of that doesn't make sense when looking at popular demand. The agreement with Microsoft is focused around systems management and has nothing to do with that; on the contrary, the agreement even allows us to work with Microsoft in new ways and I believe we'll see some positive results of that going forward as well. What's Microsoft's interest in that? Well, on the one hand they know very well that they need competition to stay alive as a company and also be challenged in their own developments; there are also some legal/anti-trust battles to be fought - some might remember that Microsoft actually helped rescueing Apple a good decade ago by investing heavily into the company (believe they still hold a share and are probably very happy with it), partially for that very reason. Even more important, as Scalix integrates well with Microsoft products such as Active Directory, coexists with Exchange and supports Outlook as a client, we have always helped securing part of their business, certainly more so than Novell or IBM/Lotus. No problem here whatsoever, we'll still continue to take bites from Microsoft's customer base - at a time almost half our new customers migrated to Scalix from Exchange and I don't see this being different going forward.

- As for the number of people left at Scalix, the numbers published might be somewhat misleading; this, for example, does not include a good number of contractors that just didn't happen to be on the formal Scalix payroll for various reasons, but had always worked with Scalix in development, support and other areas and will continue to do so. The actual number of Scalix 'people' still working on the product therefore is higher than that and you will find most of your well-known contacts still being there. The group that didn't make the transition to Scalix are mostly exec management, backoffice and some sales folks and, from a product side, at this point I am not worried about our resource situation going forward. I believe we'll be able to have a first proofpoint with a new Scalix release - Scalix 11.2 - coming up later this quarter; I'll start talking about this in due time. Another one with significant new features is planned for later this year. Therefore, I have no plans to turn out any lights; given that one of my non-negotiable requirements for a workplace are Windows (in the very physical sense as in Glass) nearby as I really prefer to use daylight that won't be that easy anyway. And we are looking at the long days of Summertime right now (btw, this is the internal codename for the next release as some may have seen in Bugzilla already).

- As for your last comment, I haven't seen any point in your logic that would suggest you should be using or promoting other products - if there is anything wrong with the product per-se (and I guess one could find many little things, as with any other software), I'd like to know, but I don't see any of the above as a valid or good reason to move away. As you might have noticed, I'm still here and nobody forced me to do that! [And don't try to talk me into this being based on financial incentives or so, I've never worked on anything in my life that I didn't believe in and I don't plan to change that model anytime soon]

Cheers,
Florian.

[jared.flannerty]

Florian,

I haven't read the whole text of the agreement that Xandros signed with Microsoft. If you have a link I'll take a look. What I know from the news and blogs at the time is that Microsoft claimed that Linux infringed on 235 of its patents and started threatening lawsuits. And, oh, by the way, didn't reveal what those patents were. All the reputable Linux distros said "put up or shut up" to the patent and walked away. Only Xandros and Novell got in bed with Microsoft.

You talk about "technology exchange" and "coexistance" but it looks to those of us in the Linux and open-source community like a couple cash-strapped companies sold out their principles for Redmond's cash. What technology is getting exchanged? How does not fighting the patent nonsense help Linux as a whole in the long term?

Furthermore, the GPL3 has been rewritten to specifically forbid the type of shady deal Xandros entered with Microsoft. So I guess true open sourcing or Xandros/Scalix is now ruled out.

With regards to numbers left at Scalix, that doesn't seem like a good sign that upper management and sales were let go. This reminds me of many "aquisitions" in the dot com days when the buying company would pick up a struggling company for a song by agreeing to keep the brightest core engineers on payroll while gutting the rest of the company. This looks like a "Hail Mary" fire sale rather than a strategic aquisition. Grim necessity of business I suppose, but hardly a cause for celebration...

About the last point, sure there are things about Scalix or any other product I'd like to change. My point is that if a company doesn't seem to have a viable business, I've got to seek alternatives even if I do like their product. Unfortunately it seems to an outside observer like me that Scalix is at this point.

-={ Jared }=-

[florian]

Jared,

couple more points here.

Not sure if Xandros has published the full text of the Xandros-Microsoft agreement - I believe not, but I would have to check; the interesting thing is that everybody talks about the patent part whiile the core part of the agreement is really about technology exchange and licensing, mainly integrating Xandros' and Microsoft's respective Systems Management infrastructure products and some protocol interoperability parts in areas where Linux-based Xandros solutions and Microsoft products coexist. Nobody has really commented about that part - it seems that most don't care with the exception of the customers that have been asking for more interoperable products for a long time, from both Microsoft and Xandros.

On the patent thing, if you check the news you'll find that this is not a mutual agreement, but Microsoft is just indemnifying Xandros *should* there be any infringements of Microsoft's existing patents in any Linux-based product published by Xandros. The protest of the open source community is that entering into such an agreement validates Microsoft's claim that Linux indeed infringes patent's owned by MSFT.

Now, if you want my opinion (and I'll add this time that this is my personal and does not necessarily represent the official position of the company I work for), it's drop dead simple. Yes, I am sure that if you are legally clever, you would find bits of code in Linux and related open source products that collide with patents held by Microsoft and other vendors. Period. The whole software world exists as a giant world of aggregation, copy/paste, implementing other peoples specs, doing similar or same things and otherwise. It's part of being in a completely networked world, of fundamental base technology (hardware) that only allows you to solve a problem in a finite number of ways and of people and technology exchange. A couple of Microsoft guys now work at Google, surely you can tell them that they may not use any knowledge from inside Redmond in their work, but (fortunately!), the MiB-type memory-eraser for our brains does not exist yet and the tagging of stuff in their isn't as good as on some tagging sites so that dangerous stuff can be filtered out.

Therefore, taking the 18th-century (and in some countries before that) concept of patents into the modern software world doesn't make any sense. There is a fine line between patents and simple theft of intellectual property, but the software world needs new definitions and new methodology. I am clearly against how the concept is currently implemented and I am happy that at least in the EU there is lots of fighting against it, both from the open source community as well as smaller software vendors. However, this is really a political questions and laws must be changed, etc. Until then, I really can't blame software companies large enough to do so for registering patents and at least trying to get some more legal peace of mind for themselves and their customers.

Now, commercial software companies seeking indemnification for their clients from possibly infringed 3rd party rights is nothing new. One of the cornerstones of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux is indemnification against unexpected copyright claims; what this means is that if any open source developer contributing to Linux or related technology is later found to be guilty of IP theft, assigning GPL-type copyrights to code that he indeed did not own and that would have made it into the distro, Red Hat would hold their customers free of any legal issues and subpoenas and whatever might occur as a consequence. They would just stand in, basically acting as a insurance that a customer would not have to shut down any of their systems or operations because of such claims, no matter what. In this case, Big Guy Red Hat protects their customers from Small Guy nonsense. Customers take such insurance and they need it - in sectors as finance, it is even obligatory to have them for business continuity reasons.

For me personally, as long as the patent debate around software is resolved on a political level, the patent thing is just about the same, only that companies are seeking to protect their customers from claims made by other vendors.

Yes, I do believe that some open source programs violate Microsoft's patents; I will make no guess on the number and the one published is most likely incorrect, tbut there will be some violations. Based on current (stupid!) law, this poses a risk to users of such software. In theory, companies like Microsoft could start trying to issue cease and desist orders for users of such technologies. Microsoft, unlike SCO, would most likely not do such crap, because the organisations affected are some of their best and most important customers and I don't think, Microsoft is actually stupid enough to cut that deep into their own meat. They, as you and I, also understand that the whole thing has no strong background.

IMHO, their only true fault is that they use the fact to create some FUD instead of being the really good guy, standing up, and help creating political pressure to clean this up; on the other hand, how can anybody blame them for that - the OSS community also creates quite a bit of Microsoft FUD and while some arguments against using the company's technology are valid and correct, some others are simply and downright wrong as well, so I guess this is normal stuff in the harsh and competitive world of being the largest software company.

From the viewpoint of some customers it's again very simple - certain types of technologies cannot easily be used at all for them (again, think finance or some automotive supply chain players) unless the legal situation is clean. They need insurance. IMHO, the Novell and Xandros agreements, at least on the patent side, are just that - insurance for the companies' corporate customers that certain things won't happen; it's the stupid type of insurance that we all believe we'll never need, yet still have to sign up for.

I firmly believe that this whole stuff will continue to go on - and might even include Red Hat at some point - until politics resolve the whole issue and that's where we should work. They've all done not-so-dissimilar things (think indemnification) in the past and if customers ask for it (and they do!) they will do it again.

I don't think coming to terms with someone on such a real issue automatically means jumping into a bed with them (at least that's not what I usually do - buying a car from a car dealer doesn't mean I'll sleep with her.... )

As for the GPLv3 part, I can't comment on that because the arguments get very hairy, legalesewise. For many useful and truthful comments, I would recommend Eben Moglen's wide body of work - he's been the legal counsel of the FSF for GPLv3, but afaik he's also adivsed Novell/Microsoft while they wrote up their agreement. The arguments whether any of these commercial agreements are in true violation of GPLv3 haven't been resolved to a point yet for me that it's clear what the actual outcome is. Now, my more important point here are the consequences; first, nobody would ever claim that an organisation entering a commercial agreement giving it patent protection (again, one-way), can no longer publish GPLv3-licensed software - it would only be where concrete patents and such software collide that there could ever be a problem. Second, I am not sure even Richard Stallman would agree if you said that only GPLv3-licensed software is True Open Source software; Scalix has published it's open source bits so far under a modified Mozilla License, like many others, and I understand the debate around that, but it's still open source software by any standards (I guess otherwise Firefox wouldn't be considered OSS) and it's not affected at all by any GPLv3 developments.

On the employee side, your analysis isn't quite right as well; Scalix's CEO, Glenn, remains on Xandros' advisory board and product (me myself ) and engineering management as part of the engineering team is still there, so it's certainly not about 'the brightest core engineers'. Presales technical people and services people are also still around and your comparison to those failed dot-coms isn't really valid IMHO, as those folks usually had some possibly interesting technology, but usually neither a business nor customers, where Scalix had - and has - both; I don't think any of the examples you're referring to would have showed up with a lineup of reference accounts comparable to ours.

We did lose a few people as part of the acquisition that we did not want to lose - part of that was pretty normal attrition for people having worked for the same employer for three, four years - sometimes you're just not in there anymore for internal organisational change. Also, the change of office locations has played a role here.

AFAICS, the Scalix group inside Xandros is very vital, on the development side we're in production mode and will publish a new release of Scalix before the end of the quarter. On the sales and marketing side, we'll be appearing at least in one major trade show in Europe in fall, have a couple of reviews coming up and I hope we've gotten our responsiveness to sales inquiries back to a normal level; at least I'm sure we're processing orders as I saw a good number coming in the other day. I don't plan to struggle here, neither does anybody else. We've been too busy to truely celebrate, but everyone at Scalix I talk to is pretty happy about the new situation.

On your last point, I can't really comment; this is your business decision. What I can say is that going with Scalix at this point is probably as safe as with any 'small' Linux-based software vendor, including our competitors, with the difference that we now have the largest company wrapped around the product of all the other direct players in the same space. So I guess if you're looking for the no-risk product in this space, your only choice would appear to be Exchange...

Good luck,
Florian.

[KermitTheFragger]

Hi Florian,

Thanks for your reply.

Now one thing about your post caught my attention - in how far do you think Scalix' Open Source Strategy and future development path are linked;

Well I assumed the opensource and enterprise components are going to share the same codebase (in a version control system of some sort). Enabling people to resolve bugs and submit patches. Am I wrong in this assumption ?

[florian]

True.

However, given that the Scalix codebase is pretty old and was created out of a commercial software product (HP OpenMail), when we established the open source program, we did not really expect too many core contributions or community becoming a core part of the development of the core product - and I think that's still true; we are getting contributions today but they are mostly add-on stuff, admin scripts and localizations. As such, development in general is not strongly influenced by open source, at least not at this point. We do get a lot of feedback from the community about what features matter the most and this actually really feeds back into development.

Cheers,
Florian.

[jaime.pinto]

I'm glad this discussion finally got back to the *substance*: how the community will continue to interact with Scaix under "new management". For a few posts there this thread started to look like to much talk and not action.
What I really care at this point is when I can have release 11.2 available, since everything went on hold. In the long term is when an *improved* support structure will be rolled out, since in general that has been the worst thing about scalix.

[mnauta]

I send an inquiry to Xandros on 8/3 about xandros server/scalix and asked about upgrade path and cost. I have not received any answer back...... not even, that they don't know yet. Not a good sign for me ....

[florian]

Manuel,

where did you send it to - I will escalate this to exec management.

Please contact me via my email or personal message with a copy of the message you sent to us.

Thx,
Florian.

[mnauta]

Manuel,

where did you send it to - I will escalate this to exec management.

Please contact me via my email or personal message with a copy of the message you sent to us.

Thx,
Florian.

I used the web form, so I do not have a copy if the text.
http://www.xandros.com/about/contact_sales.html?sales=sales

thanks
manuel

[jared.flannerty]

Florian,

Thank you for your thoughtful responses, but after the latest announcement from Xandros and Microsoft, I'll be using another company's software. (probably Zimbra)

If the open source community is to dumb to realize that revoking open access to ActiveSync is a classic "embrace and extend" maneuver, then they deserve to get screwed by Redmond.


The cash infusion may have kept payroll afloat for another couple months, but you've sold your souls.

-={ Jared }=-

[florian]

Jared,

first of all - i don't think my soul (or anybody else's) is for sale at all and if it ever was, not for such a dirt-cheap price. Being German, I'd defer to Goethe and his Faust for a full discussion of such business; the business partner in that case, though, is a lot more powerful than any company could ever be.

Certainly I can't question your decision to go with whatever you like and deem appropriate, however the justification you provide seems to miss the point. The decision here is strictly with the customer and user. If one decides to use a device based on Active Sync (i.e. a device running Windows Mobile or one with a licensed MSFT device client), he has made a choice of proprietary technology over open standards, possibly based on available functionality, nothing else. Very often, Messaging and Calendaring solutions are chosen based on the desire to use particular clients (after all, your CEO or MD will be a user, too, and he won't worry too much about the server, rather about what he will have to touch every single day). Given that the devices listed above (and - on the same page - Outlook as a client) are pretty popular (and together with the other proprietary platfrom, the Blackberry account for way over 90% market share of the mobile email client market), this is really where the choice is made. In the past, this, for many organizations, meant that they would have to use Exchange as their server of choice, because of those client requirements. This tight coupling of technology on various layers is what makes Microsoft's technology extremely pervasive and sticky.

As such, our now-ability to implement the Active Sync protocol on top of our own server provides organisations with requirements to support those clients with more choice and alternatives on the backend, i.e. allowing to run the infrastructure off a more open environment, providing for flexible directory integration and a much broader choice of clients in general. I'd see this as highly beneficial and providing more freedom of choice, which IMHO is a good thing.

With regards to the concern of embedding such technology seen as a "pollution" to an otherwise more open product, maybe it addresses your concern if you know that we currently see the 'Active Sync Server' (or Gateway or whatever) as an optional product component that will be implemented in a separate module; as such, the core of the system will not be touched by it and you would be able to implement Scalix without ever applying the technology; again, this is unless you would want to use AS devices and functionality.

I've talked through this with a couple of our customers over the last few days and, provided that they live in environments where Microsoft clients are taken as a given, they were very happy about the news, as otherwise client requirements they simply have to meet based on user demand might have actually driven them away from being able to use our technology on the server side.....

Linux' and OSS success is critically dependent on the possibility of integrating with legacy environments through their native protocol implementations; certainly SAMBA is a good example of that. While in some cases it might be possible to re-implement the protocols without licensing them from the source, in some other cases this is really not advisable due to the legal and technical risks with any reverse-engineering approach. In that case I firmly believe it is better to officially license from and work with the technology owner to give users what they want.......

Thoughts?
Florian.

[kanderson]

Jaime,

Just to follow up your post about support here, we worked together last week on a support call.

One thing that has changed and affected you is the reseller.

I was wondering if you could follow up your post about the historical crappiness of your support experiences with an update now that you've interacted with support under the Xandros banner.

Bluntly, you called for support. Was what you recieved better, or worse than what you saw 6 months ago (or whenever you had called prior to the Xandros acquisition)?

Also, during your interaction, did you see a situation which would lead to to agree with Jared, that the loss of some staff means that your company is at risk for continuing with Scalix?

As a paid customer, are you comfortable and confident with Scalix?

Thanks
Kev.