What is the NethServer Business Model?

[alefattorini (Alessio Fattorini)]

NethServer is a community effort, sponsored by a company (Nethesis). Its business model is to sell software, support, and services to other companies, customers, and resellers. Part of the revenue is used to fund development of NethServer, official site hosting, community initiatives, sponsoring, and so on. Community and company have the same target: making NethServer better and more successful, and NethServer benefits enormously from the resources that the company invests into it.

The company pays NethServer coders to write features the customers need and works with the community to make NethServer a better product. Because the company works in the open and as part of the community, and because the code is released under the GPLv3, NethServer itself continues to be free. That’s a virtuous circle and everybody wins!

Taken from this article

[zamboni (Stefano)]

Alessio, could you please enlight me and the other people about how external devs can contribute?
I mean:

• is there a place (here) where I (generally speaking) can share my plugin?
• Am I free to develop any kind of plugin?
• is there any repository for external contributions?
• is everybody free to modify everything? I mean… let’s say I want to modify a core module to add some features… is it possible?

TIA

[giacomo (Giacomo Sanchietti)]

@zamboni

• is there a place (here) where I (generally speaking) can share my plugin?

Yes: you can create a topic to discuss the feature and implement it.

@zamboni

• Am I free to develop any kind of plugin?

Of course you are! Why you shouldn’t be free to it? I don’t even get why you asked

@zamboni

• is there any repository for external contributions?

Yes: http://dev.nethserver.org/projects/nethforge/wiki/NethForge
Regarding the code, you can put in on your GitHub.
If you need, we can also create a GitHub profile named nethforge!
The code just need to be public, no matter where you want to host it.

Then anything will be published inside the NethForge repos. We are also testing a machine to give direct access to NethForge repository to any developer.

@zamboni

• is everybody free to modify everything? I mean… let’s say I want to modify a core module to add some features… is it possible?

Yes! If you want to modify something just open a pull request on GitHub!
As any Open Source project, there is a development team which has the last word on what can be included or not inside the core. The team will do code review and share thoughts about the implementation.
This team is now identified as the Owner Team (see Sign in to GitHub · GitHub), which has only Nethesis member but we are more than happy to include anyone who proved to be good-quality coder!

Here is a great example of this! GitHub - NethServer/nethserver-password: !!!WARNING!!! -- this repository has been merged into nethserver-directory on 2015-09-16
You can also take a look to the documentation repository, the ftp module, or the recent great work on fetchmail by @dz00te ( Add some columns in Connector pop3 + lang by dz00te · Pull Request #2 · NethServer/nethserver-fetchmail · GitHub)
And if you don’t have enough development skills, but you have an excellent idea like @nas on PPPoE ( Installing a pppoe client on NethServer), just open a discussion and maybe someone will develop it for you.
Finally, I think another excellent way to contribute to core modules is the QA process (@vcc and @dz00te) !

[filippo_carletti]

I’m in the Owners team, I didn’t know.
While I have the permission to commit, I usually fork a project on github and make a pull request. I prefer that @davidep or @giacomo review my bad code.

@zamboni, do you think that this community is now big enough to have a wider Owners team?

[zamboni (Stefano)]

sincerely, I had no doubt about the answers to my question…

I wrote them only to have some kind of official answer to everybody out there