The ZCA has been making some good progress on our goals following the survey. We are now in the "nitty gritty" work of getting it all organized and ready to go. This is basically a status update post.
- The ZCA plans on having a ZCA portal linked from this group available very soon.
- The ZCA is in talks with Zenoss Inc to improve all the commented issues with Core.
- The ZCA will have some beta Zenpacks for testing quite soon.
- The donation infrastructure is taking a bit of back end work to get ready. This doesn't mean that the ZCA is stopping the community focused development, nor that we won't be looking for donations in the future to help get shared community funding of development. The ZCA strongly supports that goal. Until then, the ZCA can provide "matchmaking" between community developers and users who need midsized and larger development efforts done, especially in Zenpacks. Please use the jobs board, or PM me to get help setting this up.
- The ZCA is investigating "micro-development" to see if we can economically enable quick, one off dev work / support for small jobs. More to follow.
Finally, there's a bit of administrative confusion here. The ZCA is not a separate community. You don't need to join a list or do anything to be kept in the loop. Official ZCA information will be posted here in the ZCA Space, so you can use RSS to keep up to date. We'll also cross post in the Zenoss-users forum.
The ZCA is not an alternative to Zenoss, or a competitor. We are a community organization that wants to increase the usefulness of Zenoss Core, as developed and distributed by Zenoss inc. We fully support people "stepping up" to Service Dynamics where it makes sense, and see value in Service Dynamics. That said, Core is very useful to people for many reasons, Ideological (GPL/licensing) and cost (I'm a small organization and can't afford Service Dynamics) being among them. We think that a strong community not only helps Core users, of which we are included, but also Service Dynamics users in giving them more capabilities in the way of Zenpacks and providing additional QA on the Core of the Service Dynamics product. The ZCA wants to be a partner in Core development with Zenoss Inc, and make Core the best it can be for the entire community. We plan on bringing the power of Open Source and the community to that goal of continually improving Core.
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James Pulver
Information Technology Area Supervisor
LEPP Computer Group
Cornell University
