Hi All,
Thought I'd jump in here to address a few issues.
1) There has been much discussion on this thread about how "Zimbra doesn't care about RFE's" or votes, or how we simply don't care period. I've even gotten a few PMs accusing me of being silent because "You know it's true".
This is a "Glass half full" argument. While pointing out how many rfes are unconfirmed, or targeting, people are forgetting the number of those that have been completed or targeted.
Once an enhancement is completed, it is ignored by the user-base at large because their need has been fulfilled. Remember, just because it hasn't been targeted doesn't mean we're ignoring it. It means we haven't decided how to include/implement it yet.
2) Zimbra has limited resources, and we will do what our paying customers want first, then votes second. This is why it's important to let support/or your account exec know what you want. We try to balance this with the need of our open source users...and sometimes people feel as if we don't pay enough attention..or pay too much attention to a group/enhancement. The fact that paying customers get priority with enhancements should be considered when looking at how we prioritize it. If an enh has 2 votes, but a large customer like comcast requests it, then that enh will make it sooner than a bug with 0 customers and 30 votes. Once again, this is why it's important to let us know that you're paying, and want a feature.
3) Release cycles are not only judged by when the OS vendor releases their release, but by what our components operate and user demand. Mac OS X Leopard is a great example of this. We simply cannot release NE as GA because of a bug with LDAP/Postfix. Sometimes there are OS-specific bugs that just won't work well with Zimbra. In other cases, we need to phase out a OS because we're going to introduce a feature that will only be available in the few version of the OS. Let's take Ubuntu for example. For a LONG time, they didn't have iSCSI support. This was an OS issue that impacted Zimbra. On the Mac side, it isn't the OS specifically that's causing issues, but the way we build or a component within Zimbra. These are mitigating factors when choosing OSes.
4_ Finally, user input is important. This thread title is a great example: "What does Zimbra have against OpenSUSE". Here's another question: "What does Zimbra have against Knoppix" or Mandriva, or Arch Linux, or BSD, or Sun? The answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If download and install notify numbers aren't up to par then we just can't support it. We can't support every OS in the binary form, which is why we provide source. To say that we're ignoring user demand by saying "You can build it yourself", isn't quite fair. Many software vendors take that approach because it's impossible to support and build for every platform.
With that all said, I have specifially asked our PM team to reconsider OpenSUSE. This doesn't mean that they will, but it does mean that they will look at this thread, download/install numbers, and employee resources, and make the decision.
Whether they do change their mind or not, this thread is an example that we do care and do listen.
Yours faithfully,
john  |