Is the beta period about to end?

According to the Zonbu support site, the production version is almost ready and may be only (days?weeks?) away.

I have to be honest, and I don’t want to be negative about all the great work that the Zonbu team have done, but… based on my professional software development management experience and the current state of the major Linux distros, I have a feeling they’re jumping the gun.

I would have been happier to hear the end of October or early November was a target, in order to meet the Christmas buying season….

That being said, the one app I am missing is something like Putty or any SSH client with a phone book. Having to drop to a shell to SSH, which I’ve been doing alot of lately, is a bit annoying. Other than that, the current app list is good. Although the IM client needs an update and there are some polish issues within various other apps that hopefully this “final” release will address (fonts not set up properly in Gimp for example).

Production version on its way — by Aymeric Augustin on 09/14.
Our development team is focusing its efforts on fixing bugs and upgrading software for our production version. Release 5.803 will probably be the last beta version. Thanks to the reports from our users, we have been able to improve the Zonbu experience significantly. If you are interested in getting the production version early by participating in our testing program, contact us.

I wish the Zonbu team all the best, I would just error on the side of spending more time, not less, before I removed the beta tag. As of 5.803 there was still a lot of ground to cover on the details side.

You never get a second change to make a first impression…

Moreover, the reports about support requests either going unanswered or taking weeks to elicit a response have continued. I talked about these scaling issues in other posts. Its normal start-up teething and I have every confidence that Zonbu will get it under control, but that should be fixed before anything is called final.

Note to Zonbu: You’re not seeling a piece of hardware, or a piece of organized open source software. You’re sell an experience for people who don’t want hassles. That experience extends beyond the hardware and software. Make sure you have all the pieces right before you take off that “beta” tag.

-Mr. Zonbu

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