[Users] Zimbra's bug fixing process?

[Barry de Graaff]

Hello David, hello everyone,

Responding as a member of the Zeta Alliance since the early days, I find 
it a bit saddening to read your negative feelings about Zeta Alliance 
and specifically the weekly call.

A number of us have invested a lot of (personal) time and even money 
into the Zeta Alliance. Keeping weekly meetings going is not something 
to underestimate. Some of us had to really pull and convince people to 
join in the early days and over time keeping the agenda and the talk 
going (in evening hours), takes a toll, I can tell you.


Zeta Alliance has been around for 5 years and here is a short list of 
things that Zeta Alliance deserves credit for:

 1. Successfully pushed for the ability to build Zimbra FOSS:
    https://github.com/Zimbra/zm-build
    (before the build procedure was not documented and did not work at
    all, we do not deserve 100% credit but I think we where the accelerator)
 2. Successfully delivered crowdfunded Zimlets and maintained a lot of
    orphaned Zimlets: https://github.com/Zimbra-Community
    Having these around really pushed Zimbra to the next level as often
    Zimlets from the community got redeveloped and baked into the Zimbra
    product, there now is 2FA, Nextcloud and soon RocketChat in the main
    product. I cannot prove it but this may also provided inspiration
    for all the Zimlets (Jitsi/Slack etc etc that are now in Zimbra 9)
 3. Zeta Alliance maintained a mailing list, it may not seem like much,
    but it is something every open source project should have.
    http://lists.zetalliance.org/ has a public archive of everything
    ever said on there.
 4. Kept weekly conference calls that are open for everyone to join and
    talk at. The conference call summaries are on the mailing list
    archives. We also have the agenda's of the weekly meetings at
    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDyBJFjnfZYxuXJHiDzsXjjMuGGtIl7J


On a few occasions an issue on the call was raised, that was then 
brought to Synacor via a letter or one of the attendees reaching out 
with everyone else backing. So I do not think the call is an obstacle in 
any way to improve the product.

Everyone is free to rant and shame. But I believe the community (and 
Zeta Alliance) can be better and more powerful if *more people would 
actively invest themselves and contributed their efforts in a selfless 
manner*. Anyone can help by discussing with us on the weekly call, help 
people on the forums or contribute code via sending PR's on Github.

For the rest, I support what Marc wrote.


Happy Valentines day to all and best regards,


Barry


> I might be against some ofyou here but I think the weekly Zeta call goes against the community (and global improvements).
>
> Yes, I was part of the early Zeta Alliance and I'm still around.
>
> The weekly call seemed a good idea (to me) at first.
> Chitchat between people really motivated by Zimbra, improvements and so on, outside of Zimbra's owner.
>
> But, seen from here (I might be wrong as I do not participate to the calls) it turned into a "parner call with some Synacor insiders".
>
> All of this should happen on the public forum.
> Serious talks, chitchats, answers from Synacor to question raised, shaming, etc.
>

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