[FreeNX-kNX] [Fwd: NX mailing lists shutting down]

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Hi, all,

a few moments ago I was taken by a big surprise, reading the attached 
mail from Gian Filippo, which he sent to the nx*@nomachine.com mailing 
lists.

NoMachine are shutting down their own NX mailing lists, and they are 
redirecting their users to our, the FreeNX-kNX mailing list. Gian 
Filippo promises to continue and participate here on this list (as he
did in the past), answering questions and contributing tips and tricks
as well as some of his deeper insights. I am glad to hear that, but I
would not be surprised if he also would have to cut down his time 
spent here.

I can understand NoMachine's decision, to concentrate Gian Filippo's
valuable public and free-of-charge expert support (because this is what 
he basically contributed on all the lists he posted to) onto one 
mailing list instead of spreading it across three different ones, and
giving him more time to develop new features for NX which most of us
use for free anyway.

Anyway, we are looking forward to have him more "exclusively" here 
now.  ;-)

But please: I ask all the other knowledgeable people here on the list, 
to show more initiative and respond to newbie questions. We all have
very little time, so it will make a big difference if not just 3 or 4
people answer questions, but maybe 10.

The current number of subscribers of this list is more than 300. We
will probably see quite some more joining in the coming days (though
there was a considerable overlap with the nx*@nomachine.com lists
anyway).

Cheers,
Kurt



----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

  Subject: NX mailing lists shutting down
     Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 16:37:00 +0200
     From: Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari at nomachine.com>
       To: NX Developers <nxdevelopers at nomachine.com>,  
           NX Users <nxusers at nomachine.com>

To all the NX Users and the NX Developers,

I'm finding increasingly difficult to follow all the threads and find
the time to provide timely answers. I've been the one at NoMachine in
charge of responding to most of the questions, mainly because I'm pro-
bably the one who has the best knowledge of the NX software, but also
because I personally believe that direct communication with the users
and with the developers can help improving the company and your human
being, if not the software. Unfortunately I keep having an ever increa-
sing amount of work assigned to me and, these days, I can hardly find
the time to write software. I think this is bad for the project, even
if those who don't like goto's will surely disagree :-). I'm going to
try my best to reserve an increasing amount of time to help the other
NoMachine people to solve more problems. To stop responding to the ML
is only part of the problem, but I had to start from somewhere :-/.

Apart from my wish to find more spare time, there were some other
things that made me take this decision. First of all there is now an
OSS project that is sharing with NoMachine all of the NoMachine OSS
software. This project is FreeNX and I look forward to seeing the
FreeNX mailing-lists becoming the best place to discuss the issues, the
ideas and the proposals related to the NX OSS development. NoMachine
has publicly offered free licenses to the OSS developers but we are
aware that there is a big difference between using a free license and
using a free software. It's difficult to fully share someone else's idea
of network computing as long as the company producing the software is
the only one that can benefit from it. FreeNX is the answer to this
problem and Kurt Pfeifle and Fabian Franz are those who brought it to
you. Kudos to them. They showed to the world that "it could be done"
(and that it was not that difficult, as I tried to explain multiple
times :-). I'll keep following the FreeNX mailing-list and will try to
respond there, whenever it is possible.

The second reason is that, as it probably had to be expected, the public
mailing-lists are affecting the NoMachine business. Why should people
buy the NoMachine support if they can go to the NoMachine ML, ask exact-
ly the same questions and get the main NX developers respond in no time?

The third reason is that it's difficult to maintain public-mailing lists
while being a company. There must be a reason why few (if any) of the
"big names" in the Linux world are doing that... Well, we are not that
"big", but we are neither stupid. If you want to criticize what company
XXX is doing, you can post a story to Slashdot. If the story is "politi-
cally correct", it will be published. The company XXX will take its good
dose of bashing, but will also get some free publicity. In the NoMachine
case, instead, everybody can freely post his complaints here, without any
filter, and put me and NoMachine in the position of sharing their rea-
sons and opinions. Not that me or the other NoMachine people lack rea-
sons or opinions, but sometimes it happens that we don't have time or
wish to share them :-). After all the mailing lists were not supposed to
serve that scope, but rather help the NX development... You will argue
that most of the comments are very positive and that the bashing is also
useful. It certainly is, but all this openness is also too easily exploi-
table. I have to confess that there have been cases where I would have
really appreciated the possibility of responding "if you don't like it,
fix it yourself". After all, this is the way it should work for an OSS
project. Unfortunately NoMachine is not like other OSS projects. As we
also sell a product based on the same software, we are always those that
are supposed to fix the problems, even if the people who are complaining
have never paid a dime to get the work done and have never given enough
time to looking at the source. While we value openness, different people
have different opinions on how open you must be and it's difficult to
find the right balance.

Finally let me spend one word on what NoMachine has done in these 2+
years. We have seen tremendous improvements and I'm very proud of the
work done. Lots of things could have be done better and a lot of the fea-
tures that are still in our wish-list could have been already implemen-
ted. To many suggestions that in these years have come from our users,
we could have dedicated more time. Forgive us, if you can, and, please,
don't stop using NX just because we didn't do every small bit of what
you requested. We are just at the beginning. It is not easy to build
a presence in the Linux market, especially if you are a half-OSS,
half-commercial software company, so let's say that we have been half-
successful.

The problem is that we want everything and want it now, exactly as the
NX users :-). We want to remain collaborative while being paid for
support. We want to give away most of the software we produce and keep
seling some of it. We want to dedicate ourselves to bringing an idea to
success, invest money and most of our time, gather talents, cultivate a
culture, remain enterpreneurs while being developers. They are all free-
doms that, for us, are as important as having the chance of modifying
the source code. In a perfect OSS world, users must be free to choose
their software and avoid being locked into a single solution. At the
same time, thousands of Linux companies around the world must be free
to grow a business while remaining independent. If you like freedom
as we do, you will surely understand our point.

With all my best wishes,

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.






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