Terms of service of projects.ez.no

Sunday 07 March 2010 1:38:56 am

The issue I had with eZ Systems censoring the descriptions of my projects at projects.ez.no is quite a while ago now. I would like to know if anything happened in that time, if certain terms of service were written down so it's clear what is allowed and what not. If there will not be brought clarity about this, I'm moving over all my projects the next weeks to somewhere else with a more clear and reasonable policy.

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

Tuesday 09 March 2010 2:41:48 am

I've been looking around a bit and on about all open source project hosting platforms I know about, it is allowed to mention the availability of paid commercial support. Not allowing this on eZ Projects is not a good thing for the community, as certain people who need this flexibility need to host their project on another platform. So projects will be shattered around over different hosting platforms, without any consistency and no central place to search for them.

I guess nothing has happened around this issue after the last discussions, which proofs again eZ's immobility when it concerns important topics raised by the community.

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

Tuesday 09 March 2010 10:14:15 am

Hi fellas.

First, consider this reply as coming from my personal self, as it clearly doesn't imply eZ systems itself.

First, what is being discussed here is an ongoing conversation we're having almost everyday along with nico at the office. Unlike what some seem to believe, eZ systems' goal isn't to get value from the community without anything value in return. If it had been the case, a community partner program wouldn't have been created, right ?

Whatever is gonna be decided in the end, it is a fact that everything debated here involves:

• decision making
• developement, on share.ez.no, projects.ez.no and ez.no, since they're all linked. This also involves developing procedures that will, for instance, link projects memberships and ownerships to one's profile on share.ez.no, etc
• writing

So it's not like it's gonna happen overnight. And yes, Kristof had raised the "censorship" point a year ago, but in between, almost everything has changed at eZ systems.

So no, eZ's goal isn't to force people into the business partnership program, quite the opposite, but you're gonna have to be a bit more patient. I dislike the fact that great projects now end up on external repositories, and really hope Nico can come up with something balanced, carefully though, and as satisfying as possible for everybody.

In the meanwhile, if you guys have ideas or suggestions that are worth debating here, they might end up as actual share & projects features... :)

Bertrand Dunogier
eZ Systems Engineering, Lyon
http://twitter.com/bdunogier
http://gplus.to/BertrandDunogier

Wednesday 10 March 2010 1:08:43 am

Hey, we're still way better than Sun Microsystems, are we? http://lwn.net/Articles/370157/

;)

Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board

Saturday 20 March 2010 6:39:12 am

Any official statement on this from eZ Systems? Are there any actions taken or shall I have to come back to this topic again in March 2011? I would like to see some action, finally.

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

Wednesday 31 March 2010 2:30:26 am

Hi all,

Digging up this old issue is a good opportunity to reassess our understanding of it, and try to find solutions in a peaceful and constructive way. As Bertrand said, many things have changed since the last time it was surfaced, and all conditions are now met to be able to address it conveniently.

» Advertising for commercial availability

I hear that many community members have professional activities revolving around eZ Publish, and would like to leverage the product in a for-profit activity. This goes through being able to advertise for one's paying services.

While this has always been eased by the partner program, it is, since february this year, made even easier for small to medium businesses with the Community Partner Program. This program is suited for those who want to make business around eZ Publish at low cost : http://share.ez.no/directory/community-program. One of the benefits of this program is particularly relevant in our discussion : the profile page for the community partner, with references, members of the company and projects the company members are involved in. A business identity in the eZ Ecosystem, the place to state commercial availability, and provide a means of contact, the place to be visible.

This solves the original problem: to be able to advertise for one's commercial services. Anyone needing to advertise for paying services is someone doing business in the eZ Ecosystem. She should not miss the opportunity to accelerate her business by becoming partner. Business partner if she has high-volume goals, or Community partner for a null-cost start, thus having a dedicated profile page.

And this also primes a solution for the second issue : the projects.ez.no guidelines. The above leads to a simple and clear rule concerning signature and other possible advertisement slots : only links to a partner profile page are allowed as advertisement artifacts. We will make sure existing discrepancies regarding this are fixed.

A bridge between these business identity pages and projects on projects.ez.no could be easily established. A project will be tagged, in an obvious and visual way, by its creator's partner profile (Community or Business). One can even think of having several persons/companies providing support on a project, provided the original author allows for it.

» Birth of the projects.ez.no team

The solution proposed above will require modifications on projects.ez.no. On top of this, projects.ez.no is getting a touch old. To become a terrific forge, it would greatly benefit from a facial lift, a migration to 4.3, extended functionalities, a proper search interface, the connection with share.ez.no evoked above ( merger even, if this is possible ), and this list is obviously not complete.

Just as we did for the community portal share.ez.no, I would like to propose a collaborative management and development of projects.ez.no, where ownership is shared, the evolution planned and thought through by the community, for the community. The “projects.ez.no” team will work to make the collaborative development platform a real forge. They will also start by establishing clear usage guidelines, just like for the community portal ( http://share.ez.no/about/etiquette-and-usage-guidelines ).

» A few last words

To summarize, this post proposes to leverage existing elements to satisfy your initial issues, rather than re-inventing the wheel. Gear up to do business as a SMB / freelancer there : http://share.ez.no/directory/community-program.

It also calls for action by you activists. If you really want to get things to change, you are given the possibility to do so, openly. As the share.ez.no team, the projects.ez.no is now open, so please raise your hand and join ( mail community @ ez . no ) if you have time and a lot of positive motivation to share with the community. I will then make sure you have all necessary tools to make projects.ez.no a brilliant forge of eZ Publish extensions and apps.

Time for transforming remarks and ideas into action. Let's go for it guys :)
--
Nicolas

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye

Monday 05 April 2010 12:15:15 am

By the way, the Community Partner registration form is behaving a bit weird IMHO, see http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=16577 and http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=16576

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

Thursday 15 April 2010 4:15:52 am

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for digging into this issue and coming up with a proposal. However, a profile page alone will not do the trick. Contactivity has had one for years (even listed as a Gold Partner), but hardly got any business through it - it is just not a very visible and attractive place to advertise.

More visible advertising is the way to develop enterprise open source software. It will convince potential clients that professional support is readily available and will make it more attractive for commercial companies to showcase their ez publish based products. And why not charge a fee for advertising - we would be happy to pay for it.

Kind regards,
Sebastiaan

Certified eZ publish developer with over 9 years of eZ publish experience. Available for challenging eZ publish projects as a technical consultant, project manager, trouble shooter or strategic advisor.

Friday 09 July 2010 2:14:36 am

Hi Kristof,

This discussion still is ongoing, although it did not show any activity in the past weeks. And the proposal is not implemented. Your message is a good opportunity to resume it, and take into account the new elements which came into play since the last message.

Let me try to quickly sum-up the suggestion i had made on Wednesday, 31st of March. The idea was to implement an egalitarian handling of commercial advertisement within the eZ Publish Community. Only partners would be allowed to do so. As a reminder, the two existing partner programs were pointed to :

• The for-large-business Business Partner Program
• The for-smb-and-freelancers Community Partner Program, detailed here

By the way, congratulations again for being one of our Community Partners Kristof. This first condition does not appear as a blocking point, given that the Community Partner program is free and open to anyone having one eZ Publish reference.

Request was made to have the possibility to advertise for one's commercial availability on project pages, which, according to Sebastiaan's argument is a good way to display an integrator's relevancy. The proposal made stated the possibility to visually label a project with the creator's/maintainer's partner status. This could take the form of a logo placed close to the project's title, linking to the creator's partner page, where contact information, description and open advertisement is encouraged. One could think of other visual artifacts, please suggest !

The first new element pops up here : the soon-to-be merger of share.ez.no and projects.ez.no (read these slides to get the big picture) will allow for more connection between the development work and the partner profiles. One thing will be to list a company's projects (as member or leader) on the company's profile page in share.ez.no's yellow pages. Concretely Kristof, your Community Partner profile would comprise the impressive list of all projects you either created or participated to. This strengthens the link between somebody's actual development work and her branding within eZ.

The second new element comes into play here : a new certified extension program will be launched, very likely to be way more efficient and easier for partners than the previous one. In short, this will take the form of an extension store, direct channel between the authors and the customers. This will allow for making business around extensions (for-pay ext or for-pay support), and the eZ certification label will help catch attention. More on this later, but bear in mind that this will be a way to satisfy your expectations.

I am keen on hearing opinions on this.

Cheers,

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye