What about the community?

Community is never excluded from a free software project. There is always a community edition and Kolab is no exception. Anyone can grab the community edition from Kolab.org and use it in whatever set-up they want.

There is no difference between the community and enterprise version – there is no secret sauce in the enterprise version. The community version also sits on a secure server and Kolab team takes responsibility for it and they do as much as they can to support this version.

The difference is in release cycles, how long versions are available, lack of guaranteed updates, and who gets priority when it comes to fixing critical issues or implementing new features. “Most development happens in the open in the latest branch of the community version. So there is always more motion, usually more features, but also less stability. And the time based release every 6 months means that professional users should be actively involved in the QA and development or else they risk being left behind on a deprecated branch of development.”

“We do our best to make the community version as good as we can make it. But if there is a choice to be made Enterprise has to come first. And things then go to the community version as and when possible. So the benefit customers get by paying is that they get priority, but their support also benefits the entire community which gets the benefits, although in a less predictable fashion” clarifies Greve.

However, nothing gets locked into the enterprise edition, everything is made available as free software. Everyone benefits from it.

Contrary to the stabilized enterprise editions, the community version is released every six months. They ship whatever is ready for the release cycle, which is followed by regular updates like any other community software.

“This is for people who want to play with technology, develop and get their hands dirty. People engage. They experiment with the code, play to solve their own etches, build up their competency,” says Greve.

Can I fork Kolab?

Kolab uses a mix of free and open source licenses and allows forking. Forking is a good thing. If someone wants a feature or doesn’t want a feature or wants to do things in a manner that the project won’t do she can always take the code and do her own thing. Sometimes the ‘mother’ project realizes that it was actually a good thing and then merges that feature bringing the fork back – that’s the beauty of free software licenses, it allows one to merge things back.

At the same time, forks have a cost and are not always successful. Many times people think that it’s easy to fork the code, but don’t realize how much work it takes to continue to write the code and maintain it. Google has demonstrated this in the past, and is now spending substantial effort to bring its fork of the Linux kernel back into the mainstream since it has become too costly for them to maintain a fork. And often, if it is a good idea, someone else will also do it in the mainstream and suddenly a fork realizes that the feature they wanted is now available in the primary project.

Most of the time they realize that it’s more productive to work with the project rather than forking it.

In any case Kolab encourages people to do their own things if they want. But they do encourage coordination and communication so things can be improved for everyone. So they explicitly make no effort to discourage people from forking it. “…we don’t prevent this legally or otherwise simply because we don’t have any intention of preventing it,” says Greve.

Balance between innovation, development and stability

Kolab doesn’t just sit on the technologies that it has developed and keep things in maintenance mode for the sake of stability.

According to Greve, “We develop fast and sometimes some features take time to stabilize and our customer wants it when it is stable. At the same time they also want to ensure that they can use it for the next five years without having to worry about another update within the next half year.”

Kolab system delivers that innovation along with uncompromising stability and – an often underestimated aspect – a guaranteed upgrade path for the future.

Why to switch to Kolab?

It’s wonderful to see that Kolab is being developed in pure Open Source sense, but what reasons does it give an enterprise to switch to Kolab?

There are some very obvious benefits of using Kolab solutions – it’s open source, it’s secure, and it’s based in a neutral country.

Georg Greve explains in detail, “From a strategic point of view it’s open source, open standard solution so no lock-in at much better cost effectiveness. It’s very secure and extremely scalable so you can achieve a lot with very limited hardware and infrastructure investment.”

“In one set-up you can get a very elegant load balancing, site reliability, high availability all-in-one set because every single component of the Kolab server in itself is clusterable, monitorable, scalable and replicable. Each component of Kolab server talks to each other over secure network protocols – which also means you can distribute it in ways in your network where you can secure and control the information flow much better with almost any other solution.”

There are many other advantages of using Kolab. One notable benefit is easy integration with almost every other solution because of the way in which Kolab stores information through APIs and libraries. This also makes it a very good thing for backup and recovery because everything is filed on disk which means every backup system in the world is capable of backing up a Kolab server perfectly and you can restore that one file to its location and just rebuild the IMAP index and then you are ready to go.