I am wondering if Zammad is rather a community or or commercial software. As it seems here and in the github there is a huge backlog of open issues.
Are there any contributors not working for zammad company?
The number of active contributors seems rather small:
Who is answering and community questions? Zammad company members seem to priotize community questions low ( Asking for help on community ).
@MrGeneration seems to be the only active person answering questions.
Do not get me wrong, I like what I have seen so far, but I want to understand, if this is a real open source project (in terms of contributor spririt) or just a commercial open source licensed software.
In case the latter, is anybody aware of a ticket system software with a real open source community spirit?
Not sure how it works but I would guess the majority of resources are spent on the customers who purchase an enterprise support licence, why wouldn’t they? If you want better response times etc, I would consider buying an enterprise support licence. Personally I have have a bad experience with solely open source projects, if you come to rely on them and the development dies you are in for a headache, trust me I came from Spiceworks. I have confidence in Zammad flourishing as it has a funding source, ie: the support licence fees, to keep developers interest. Zammad is the best I could find for my scenario, I also believe its one of the best overall, if not the best, so its popularity will only increase.
I really should rework my Asking for help post one day… there’s a lot of frustration involved which seems to regulary confuse on priorities and stuff, I am sorry.
The Zammad Community is active. I don’t think pinning the activity of a project down to one repository is the right way. Every contribution people do to a project count and make a difference.
A contribution doesn’t have to mean “by submitting code”, but also by helping others (see this board, we have plenty users beside me replying as well), translating stuff or updating typos.
I’m intentionally not talking about sponsorings and those things because I don’t want people to feel that this is a mandatory thing. But yes, those things also help.
Of course we do prioritize our paying user base much more a freebie may like… however: Those people are paying our rents, coffee and food. Open Source doesn’t mean “free” - even through people love to refer “Open Source” as being free, in fact it’s not under the hood.
We’ve been working very hard on several aspects of Zammads universe in the past to improve usability and availability of information. This is something that’s made possible by paying customers - but Community users also benefit from that.
TL;DR Every contribution no matter of it’s form is relevant and helping a lot. It doesn’t have to be source code.
I don’t think you can measure the activity of a project that way, because after the start of a project, the communication channels also expand and don’t stay limited to e.g. Github.
Real-time capable Web-Apps that follow the “dry principle” as extensively as Zammad are currently building up well in the web market, and will have a very good future.
Open source for me means more security. I don’t need a closed source application that requires a permanent WAN connection for on-prem support…
FWIW, I have a rather long history as a community member in Zimbra. In times when Zimbra was on its own, there were a lot of devs and tech leaders hanging around in the forums, and this was much appreciated by all the participants, being them paying customers or not.
OTOH I understand participating to discussions is a lot time consuming, and this can be a problem in a small and fast team.
Just remember this when there will be more resources.
I appreciate Zammad a lot, I like how it works and I’d like to participate more. But time is short on this side as well.
