OPEN LETTER TO THE NETATALK COMMUNITY

Making money from Opensource, but who makes the source ?

We love Netatalk. We want to dedicate 100% of our time to it. We have to pay our bills and rents. We’re striving to establish a healthy business dedicated to the development and support of a robust and reliable AFP fileserver.

The Netatalk development community pretty much vanished, besides us only one active contributor is left who contributed code in the last two year, all other development was driven by us.

In severe contrast to this, many corporations are using and making money from Netatalk, but in the past none of these cared that the cow they’re milking gets fed, Netgear Inc. being the one exception, thanks for that.

Now in order to stir things up, we’ve released NetAFP Netatalk 2.2.0 to customers only, without pushing to Sourceforge. Sourceforge Netatalk will stay at 2.2-beta4 until we’ve convinced enough OEMs that working with us is in their own interest, until we generate enough revenue to pay our bills.

This is not a fork, but a spoon. Netatalk current will only be accessible to customers, later becoming stable and released via Sourceforge.

We’re very excited that some more OEMs are now working with us, but we still need to grow business. Once the majority of Netatalk OEMs get together, join forces and support the project, we can return to a complete open development model.

If this fails, we have to give up the project and move on, leaving Netatalk in a state it has been in between 2005 and 2009. Who wants that ?

Update (July-23-2011):

Thanks to the new commitment of Data Robotics, QNAP, Lacie and Thecus there’s hope! Also, we’re reopening development, pushing all sources to the official Netatalk git VCS at Sourceforge. We expect Netatalk 2.2.0 sourcecode tarballs to be available at the Sourceforge download site soon.