Re: [hylafax-users] Fedora Core 5 RPM

["Darren Nickerson" <darren.nickerson@xxxxxxxx>]

"Dimitrios" <sehh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Here is how i think it works:
>
> Hylafax is open source, but its beign developed by a specific company.

Actually that's not correct. While one company does support the 
infrastructure that hylafax.org runs on, it is and always has been a true 
open source project, with democratic governing principles and a public 
development process. You may not know that early HylaFAX development was 
done by one person - Sam Leffler. The hylafax.org site was in fact the 
original transition from an ivory tower (Cathedral) model to the Bazaar 
model which we all greatly prefer. The bug tracker, CVS repository, and even 
these very mailing lists were formed years ago by some of the people who are 
still around today, and have been used by a great many people to contribute 
to HylaFAX. It's thanks to this public development process that HylaFAX is 
what it is today, a fantastic, modern and relevant piece of fax software.

> These nice people understand the way open source projects work (The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar sort of way) thus, instead of having the entire
>  project within their own business, they keep it on sourceforge.

The sourceforge project is a fork of HylaFAX started by a developer who got 
frustrated with the democratic process at HylaFAX.org. Is is (as far as I 
know) an autocratic 'benevolent dictator' model where one person calls the 
shots - which is entirely different than hylafax.org, where we develop by 
concensus and all opinons are welcomed, and contentious decisions are made 
by the majority. It's a fundamentally different approach. While I firmly 
believe that the sourceforge site should have been named differently to 
prevent confusing people (and most importantly to make it clear that it's 
not the same group of people), I think that whenever and wherever HylaFAX 
development is being done, it's a good thing. You'll notice that work that 
iFAX and others contribute to hylafax.org makes its way into the sourceforge 
version, and the reverse is also true, we at hylafax.org select some of the 
sourceforge work and integrate it into releases such as 4.3.0 that we 
recently produced.

> Thus, the code on sourceforge is publicly available and adopts patches,
> updates and new code very fast. While the release on the hylafax.org site
>  is supported by the company for their clients and doesn't get the public
>  patches etc. Thus making it more "supportable" (if there is such a word)
> by their business towards their clients.

This could not be farther from the truth. iFAX does have a version of 
HylaFAX that we maintain internally. We gave it a different name to avoid 
confusion, and it actually is VERY conservative. We do like our customers to 
use it whenever possible, because it does make supporting it a little 
easier. But we base our conservative version on top of whatever the current 
open source release is, so we are also SIGNIFICANT contributors to the open 
source version of HylaFAX. Whenever we discover a bug, we contribute the 
fix - there are countless examples in the hylafax.org bugzilla. We also add 
new features to open source HylaFAX - an iFAX developer was one of the 
principal authors of the new JobControl feature we're all so excited about 
in 4.3.0, and we worked very hard to improve the stability of batching. Just 
to be clear, iFAX pays people to work on open source HylaFAX ... we are 
actively funding the development of the version of HylaFAX that many of you 
are downloading and using on a daily basis. You'll see a lot of our work 
appear at sourceforge as well, ... that's because everyone benefits from 
open development.

I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion!

-Darren



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