[Users] April 21, 2020 Zeta Alliance Conference Call Summary

[Marc Gadsdon]

Dear All, 

A couple of clarifications to Randy's excellent notes. As always, thank you so much Randy - it's a great service.

> Marc G. said that he feels that the open source policy is a very important part
> of the value proposition of Zimbra and that he feels that Synacor still has not
> succeeded in engaging the open source community because there are key requests
> that seem to have been mostly ignored. 

Yes, they have [apparently] ignored some issues, but I pointed out Synacor, in direct response to our collective feedback in New York 3 years ago, made welcome changes to support the community (contributors agreement, github etc).  I also pointed out that I do not feel they have communicated those achievements well. 

> One example he cited was the long-promised replacement for Zimbra’s Bugzilla
> site, where the community was previously able to report product bugs and upvote
> bugs that were of high importance to fix.

This is in relation to my feeling that it would really help all parties if Synacor could provide clarity over these issues and engage more freely, particularly on the forums. In fact, I think Synacor would realise that the community are helpful and have a great willingness to work in harmony with Synacor, and the community would get to understand some of the challenges faced internally by Synacor.  

Bugzilla is a prime example - a few years ago at Forum France we had a constructive discussion about Bugzilla with Rene and John. We got to hear about their internal challenges with it.  However, only gold partners were in the room, the conversation was in English and the majority in the room were not native English speakers and so I wondered at the time whether everyone understood the nuances.  After the meeting, there was Florent's update: https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?p=282539#p282539) and later, Gayles's official statement here: https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=63913#p282651. I don't think that there has been any other public statements since then.  Yet surely everyone at Zimbra has heard the subject of Bugzilla many times during private conversations with customers and partners and it's been mentioned again and again in public forums.  Surely this is a clear signal to Synacor to engage with the community and figure out a solution, to what is clearly such an important tool for everyone, paying customers (and their partners) included.

Best wishes to all and hope you are not going to crazy, in these crazy "stay at home" times.

Marc