Question about "community support" subscription

[kofik]

G'day

I have seen Martin's announcement about new subscription called "Proxmox VE Community Support" - I absolutely agree that someone has to pay the living for the guys doing this fabulous job on Proxmox VE. I absolutely see the value in paying for open source support services when I use it for business critical stuff so that's out of discussion.

But: I don't seem to get the usefulness / "value" of the community subscription compared to the Basic and higher level which include a defined number of support cases. The only difference I get is, that I can only then buy support tickets if I need someone to help when my production I gets into serious trouble?

I have (unfortunately) met such questions on other projects. Good clarification on goals of the company backing a project helped to make it clear what the company is planning with the community and the project.

 

[martin]

With the community subscription you get guaranteed access to the repositories and you get support via the public forum. the public forums are fully moderated by our staff, so far our team helped with ten-thousands of postings.

or in other words, if we got 100 forum posting/issues and 2 of them are from community subscribers, just guess which requests have priority?

if you have further questions you can also submit a general request via https://my.proxmox.com

 

[kofik]

Hi Martin

So If I have understood correctly, the community support is a low-price offer by you
guys for companies/users that don't want / can't pay Basic or higher-level subscriptions but want to:

• Show continued appreciation for all your efforts on annual basis (BTW: My experience was, that subscription bills often pass easier than donations...)
• Have a slight priority when they show up in the forums yelling for some help
• Can yell louder when the repositories are down compared to non-paying users

Therefore nothing about:

• Subscriber-only repositories
• Subscriber-only "enterprise" (and possibly closed-source) features
• Dual-Licensing *FUD*
• Source only for paying customers (which is what Bacula Enterprise for example is doing while fullfilling with GPLv3 requirements)

Thanks for your answer that relieves me.

 

[mir]

Therefore nothing about:

• Subscriber-only repositories
• Subscriber-only "enterprise" (and possibly closed-source) features
• Dual-Licensing *FUD*

The above is not possible due to the AGPLv3 license. Remember when linking against copyleft licensed code your code will automatically adopt the same license. To dual license your work you are required to have the complete copyright of all the code involved.

• Source only for paying customers (which is what Bacula Enterprise for example is doing while fullfilling with GPLv3 requirements)

This is clearly against GPLv3. You cannot make source available only to paying customers and still claim the code is licensed under GPLv3 you are required to make your code available for everybody. You should report this to fsf.org.

 

[m.ardito]

There's something (maybe the only one thing) that i sometimes don't like about PVE team: they sometimes lack "some more words" where it could be needed to make thinks perfectly clear. This may be tipical of a german-language based culture, i don't know, or maybe that my (italian) culture tipically seems to need many many many words about everything :-D, tipically much more than the "strictly needed essential"... although if you carefully read their post, and understand the whole burden of the software, the kernels, the wiki, the forums, the commercial support and the need for a normal life, you understand they're doing really much and everything with great quality (and i'm thanking them for all).

That said, from the sticky (closed) Martin's post, someone could also understand that "there is no free forum support" from the PVE team, not that paying users have higher priorities...
If this is true, there's nothing wrong with this, it's perfectly clear that who pays has to have a better service, and I think you deserve every cent people pays, and much more, but sometimes some more words could be useful to make it really clear, IMHO.

Sorry if i misunderstood, someone, something.
Marco.

 

[dietmar]

That said, from the sticky (closed) Martin's post, someone could also understand that "there is no free forum support" from the PVE team

Well, that is quite easy to test ;-)

 

[kofik]

I am really not the one who likes bike-shedding about licensing neither am I am expert on this topic but I had that "itch that I had to scratch" thus this question.

The Proxmox VE code on top of Debian is copyrighted in most parts by "Proxmox Server Soliutions" and - the company could - but didn't chose to dual-license this code.
If you own the copyright, you can do whatever you want with it. Agreed: Not if you bind against (A)GPL software.

I have to revise my statement about Bacula's enterprise branch (which is also AGPLv3): The source of their enterprise branch is available
but not publicly for everyone to grab on a server - it's available on demand. Bacula has another background and is another story, their project
leader's decision can be read here. The (A)GPL licenses allow this - and there are companies who do so and even charge resobably for a media,
see: AGPLv3, Section 6, b)

Concluding: "Proxmox Server Solutions" is not required to have a public git repo, neither is RedHat required to publish Source RPMs of RHEL.
But it is a very community-friendly way to comply with the (A)GPL. - Which I totally appreciate.

In fact I even feel a bit ashamed to have asked such questions about Proxmox VE anyhow turning closed-commercial.
Martin, you have clearly denied any objections to do so, and showed the value of a Community Subscription, thanks!

I absolutely whish you the same commercial succes with Proxmox VE as you have in the community. Actually I im in the course of converting a small company from VMware to Proxmox. I (as being from CH and with relation to latin-language culture) tend to agree with Marco that german-speaking culture can be sometimes perceived as being a bit too short (alas, these are cultural differences...).

 

[michu]

Hi,

Martin, does it mean that you plan to close access to apt repositories (updates) for people who don't buy a licence ?


Regards,

 

[kobuki]

Having priority "community support" for a low price is perfectly reasonable. And the PVE is a great project that deserves this support. However, when making a statement about support possibilities or licensing it is best to make everything perfectly clear and precisely define what is what. A part of the support statement by Martin is (possibly purposefully) ambiguous and could be easily misleading because of its wording: "You get commercial support and help via several support channels, and guaranteed access to the Proxmox VE repositories for updates and bug fixes." (Emphasis mine.) The bold part can be interpreted as if the repositories would cease to be freely available/not guaranteed to be available for non-paying customers in the future as they are now. Please could you clarify this for all of us. Thanks.

 

[e100]

This has already been answered:

http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/9343-Understanding-the-new-paid-support-and-updates

 

[kobuki]

Yeah, kind of has been, my bad. There is no plan to block - that is good enough, I guess...