What does Zimbra have against OpenSUSE

[jholder]

Hi all,
Wanted to give you an update on the PM meeting today. For those who don't know, PM stands for Product Management, and it's the team that decides which features/builds we use.

We discussed this for quite a while today, and read the thread at legnth.

We have decided to continue to EOL it, and here's why:
We're loosing money on it. I can't give you an exact number, but it's quite a bit.

Normally, we would continue to foot it for you, but with the economy the way it is, it's better for us to cut a build/qa time/build time for a build, than it is to cut staff.

Just so that there isn't any question: The Zimbra Team as you now have know it is intact and will be, and we're even hiring. But, it doesn't make sense for us to support something that's costing us money that we won't get back, when economic conditions are the way they are. It does a disservice to our shareholders as well.

With that said, and out of the way, we will be introducing many new developer tools to help you build things easier.

I hope everyone who reads this thread, and is bothered by this understands that it was not an easy decision, and the forums are available to help you migrate if needed. Also, I hope that users will indeed keep building for SuSE.

If you have questions, concerns, or complaints, feel free to post then, or email myself (jholder@zimbra.com) or any other moderator.

All the best,
john

[LMStone]

Hi John,

I really appreciate the transparency here, and thank you and the entire PM team for taking the time to revisit the initial decision to EOL OpenSUSE as a supported platform.

The only thing I confess I was hoping to see in your post was a reaffirmation of long-term support for NE deployments on SLES.

Can you tell us if the discussions at this PM meeting touched on SLES as a supported platform?

Specifically, will Guns N' Roses be supported on SLES10/11?

Thanks again, and with best wishes for the Holidays,
Mark

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by LMStone

Specifically, will Guns N' Roses be supported on SLES10/11

There's been no change to NE support of SLES10: Zimbra Product Portal

[raj]

Originally Posted by jholder

Hi all,
.. we will be introducing many new developer tools to help you build things easier...
john

John it would be a great help to have a VMware image of a working dev setup where if a "zimbra admin" can follow some simple steps he/she can build zimbra.

As of today just getting the Dev Env ready is such a big job that its impossible to build zmbra without being a real linux geek or more..
i guess on this forurm only "dijichi2" has build zimbra from scratch and we have thousands of registerd users and thousands of people using the oss version..1 or 2 is a very grim number.

anyone who like this to happen we can open a thread and try to figure out how as opensouce community we can come up with "VMware image of woking dev env to build zimbra"

Raj

[Jbrabander]

Originally Posted by jholder

But, it doesn't make sense for us to support something that's costing us money that we won't get back

Now, technically, don't all the freebie versions do that?

Sorry...just had to be a pain in the rump this morning.

I agree with LMStone though. Although the issue with SuSE doesn't affect me, it's really nice to see the transparency with this decision making process. That's not something you'll really get with other companies.

[dijichi2]

John it would be a great help to have a VMware image of a working dev setup where if a "zimbra admin" can follow some simple steps he/she can build zimbra.

As of today just getting the Dev Env ready is such a big job that its impossible to build zmbra without being a real linux geek or more..
i guess on this forurm only "dijichi2" has build zimbra from scratch and we have thousands of registerd users and thousands of people using the oss version..1 or 2 is a very grim number.

Quite a few people have built zimbra, just they tend to do so quietly and not for public consumption. I think there's two main areas where building zimbra is useful to the community:

1) To produce community binaries for platforms that aren't supported officially. Optionally producing patches for these platforms if necessary. This is my goal, and hopefully more people will start to do the same - there is already a OSX PPC community build, and Sun have started to contribute Solaris builds.

2) To provide a development platform where the innards of zimbra itself can be explored/tweaked/improved. This is an area traditionally where the community has been quite weak, I think in large part due to the difficult nature of the build process - developers want to stare at oop code, not system dependency errors.

Actually, building Zimbra is not that difficult, it's the supporting thirdparty software that is difficult. Once you've got ThirdParty build, the main Zimbra is a breeze. What would definitely help is to provide precompiled ThirdParty packages for each platform, that would help developers immensely, as it bypasses 95% of the pain of building Zimbra. I will start to do this with Solaris for the next release and will consider it for other platforms if there is good call.

In terms of a VMware image, well yes this might be useful but it's quite constraining - I think good clear instructions (Welcome to varlogmessages, sorry for the plug) and a precompiled ThirdParty package will be more effective.

[dijichi2]

John, I'm very intruiged by the new developer tools you've mentioned! Care to expand? (Possibly in a new dev forum thread?)

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by phoenix

There's been no change to NE support of SLES10: Zimbra Product Portal

I know that John, and I also know you are limited as to what you can disclose.

SLES10 gets mainstream support to 2011; that's only two years away. SLES11 is already in beta, and SLES distros typically enjoy mainstream support for five years at a minimum.

Assuming SLES11 goes GA sometime next Spring, any new Zimbra boxes we build at that time I would prefer to host on SLES11 rather than SLES10, since enterprise mail servers typically have five-year (or longer) life spans.

Dropping support for OpenSUSE when you support Fedora; being silent on your planned support for SLES11, and supporting only one version of SLES on GunsNRoses when you support two versions of RHEL at least to me gives the impression--unintended or not--that Zimbra's support of SLES is just not on par with that of RHEL.

And to be frank, certainly the planned seamless migration from SLES9 to SLES10 never really happened, and the failed log file rotation bug in ZCS 5.0.x on SLES10 (that could have easily been discovered had someone in QA kept a SLES box running overnight, and which didn't get fixed until past 5.0.6), combined with the above only reinforces the impression that SLES gets less attention inside Zimbra than does RHEL.

Perceptions are one thing, and reality can often be entirely different, so really what I am asking is for some guidance from Zimbra regarding their planned support for SLES10 and SLES11 over the coming years.

And if the answer is "please see the Product Portal" (which I completely understand may be the only answer you can give), then we will likely stop deploying new systems on SLES pretty much immediately.

How otherwise could I explain to a client that we built their new five-year mail server farm on a platform that is good only for two years, when the vendor has provided no clear upgrade/migration path?

John, I hope this post doesn't come across as negative; it isn't. Zimbra's decision to support SLES is entirely up to Zimbra. And while our shop has a preference for SLES over RHEL, we are not a reseller (intentionally) and so doing Zimbra deployments on RHEL going forward would not be a big problem for us.

All I am asking for is a little more guidance on SLES's future within Zimbra; and I hope I have explained clearly how Zimbra's current stance on SLES could be perceived as Zimbra having a lower interest in SLES than in RHEL.

Please, please do take this post in the constructive manner in which it was intended!

With best regards,
Mark

[tgx]

And for the final kicker....
OpenSuSE awarded Distro of the Year by arstechnica..

The 2008 Ovatio Awards, by Ars Technica: Page 7

[Bill Brock]

[QUOTE=jholder;118244]Hi all,

Just so that there isn't any question: The Zimbra Team as you now have know it is intact and will be, and we're even hiring. But, it doesn't make sense for us to support something that's costing us money that we won't get back, when economic conditions are the way they are. It does a disservice to our shareholders as well.

It makes sense in the true spirit of FOSS. It doesn't make sense when it all becomes about money, or the true spirit of capitalism.

It's really great that Postfix, Apache and the rest of the free code Zimbra uses didn't end up with the same attitude that is now exuding from Zimbra.