Is it still Open Source? Are we all beta testers?

Hi I follow a lot of your post
Did you get new employee?
Is this still open source?
what is the purpose of this post in open source?

Not following. NethServer has been always Open Source since the beginning
Please explain :wink:

Like Brother Alessio said, it is and has always been Open Source. They have only created a subscription service to help users if they need assistance that is beyond the community or if you require urgent assistance if you ever run into any problems.

You can use without subscribing, but if you want that peace of mind knowing that when you need help you will get an expert to help you solve any issues, before your end users eat you alive :grinning:.

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Ehi Tyron, can I steal this quote to promote Subscription ? Really nice :wink:

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:grin: sure. You guys have made an awesome software. I promote it every chance I get. Has made the life of this sysadmin a whole lot easier. I used just about every other software out there and have cast them all aside since I found Nethserver. Keep it up.

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Not quite: I also need to buy a subscription if I don’t want to be their Beta tester.
I’m a certified Red Hat sysadmin so I don’t need support with a simple Linux server, I just started using Nethserver last year since it has a really nice web-based dashboard where I can trust others to do basic stuff without breaking things.
Right now, for me, it’s a lot safer to go back to a standard CentOS install…

If you have a standard CentOS install and want to upgrade the same features of NethServer (nDPI, traffic shaping, Samba DC self compiled…) you will find similar issues. We are a community, we can help each other.

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A server like Nethserver is much more complicated than a simple bare centos, we talk about postfix, antivirus, sambaAD, VPN, sharing point…and a lot of modules that you can simply install with a left click…This freely, except if one day I can meet you in the real life to share a beer.

Even if you go to centos, you will have the same regressions/changes because nethserver is a clone of centos

I shared with @davidep Friday, he was so sorry about the community issue on the centos changes, but at the end, how can we avoid this, test all pre-beta before and try to fix bugs.

This needs money, hence the subscription, because a lot of people are needed.

I have had the chance to visit the nethesis office, it is about ten developers, not all the time on the community version, because they have to sell service to customers.

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The only period where it may look like beta testing is after a new upstream release and it takes some time to make everything work again. Because of upstream release issues last time, there’s a warning now, so you can wait until everything is fine again: (Scroll down to Upstream updates awareness)

To keep the version until everything is working:

So you are not a beta tester, if you don’t want it. The subscription gives you the possibility to autoupdate and don’t care about it anymore. To be a beta tester, you have to enable a separate testing repo.

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:thinking: Mmmh, it depends on what we’re talking about. We used the term “beta” to mark an ISO or the state of a repository branch (like 7.5.1805/), according to this defintion:

http://docs.nethserver.org/projects/nethserver-devel/en/v7/development_process.html?highlight=beta#pre-releases

BTW: as all reported Bug were closed we’re ready to go to BETA

NethServer 7.5 beta Milestone · GitHub

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I tend to disagree with you on this one.
If you can stay of that updatebutton untill updates are confirmed safe, you don’t need that subscription and you will not be the guinea pig you describe. If you want to be sure, test updates (as a good sysadmin should always do) before applying on production servers.

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I tend to agree, instead, @robb.
Since by default the updates/migration to newer release are by default applied, only with a warning, this makes all installations quite… beta.

And prone to be broken by bugs and incompatibilities, when CentOS start to release a Y.x+1 version.
There’s nothin particularly wrong with that, if its clearly stated into documentation as “major warning” at first page.

7.5 is currently classified as Alpha from @dev_team. Which should not mean “stable”, by my knowledge…

It is posted afew posts above, but do have a look at the lock prcedure for new releases: http://docs.nethserver.org/projects/nethserver-devel/en/latest/nethserver-release.html#locking-to-a-specific-distribution-release
I just applied this on my (non subscription) home server and all 7.5 updates were left out and I could safely update the remaining packages.

I’m glad that for your installation everything went as expected. Not for all folks the procedure runned smoothly, as far as i can see into the forum.
There’s nothing wrong with that, IMHO this condition should not be the default one (upgrade to untested version, just like Beta and Alpha without explicit confirmation).

Therefore, i filed a feature request into forum. This seems not enough now for the dev team which is asking a pull request into gitub. And now i am still not member of Github…

Sorry I don’t follow, could you provide a link?

Isn’t an alert message already shown in Software Center? Do you think we need to reword it differently?

https://community.nethserver.org/t/remove-link-to-server-manager-from-welcome-page/
i were asked by @giacomo to open a PR…

Sorry not following. Why those topics are connected?

IMVHO yes.
-Feature request for changing the Welcome Page of http (moved to support, answered “open a PR”) for remove the link to the admin interface
-Feature request for adding a version lock by default into next version of NethServer

I don’t know if these feature will be implemented one way or another. I’m trying to contribute with my opinions, ideas and perspectives (open source and free :wink: ) for making a better NethServer.

Yes, you’re right. I am not a developer, a support specialist or a proven ground Linux Sysadmin. I hope that’s not mandatory for put my ideas…

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Yes there is.

I think that should not appear at all, if there’s an CentOS version upgrade. I opened the topic into Feature section to avoid this kind of situation.

That sounds like something you could change pretty easily.