Announcing the Cyrus Foundation and development plans for 2015

[Bron Gondwana]

[Sorry for the late delivery of this email, I've spoken a bit about this
on IRC already, and the first meeting is in less than 24 hours, but I've
been swamped by emergency other work.]

Late last year a few of us formed a plan.  A non-profit foundation
(incorporated in Canada because that's where our biggest sponsor is
based) and some real resources to take Cyrus from its current status as
a great project that's hard to manage and not well documented into a
well rounded product that can compete with other proprietary or free
solutions without needing a "Cyrus expert" on staff.

I posted my giant wishlist/roadmap last year, and we will be picking the
highest value items from that list to release as Cyrus 3.0 this year. We
have resources.  As well as Ken Murchison at CMU and myself at FastMail
who have been doing this a while, we two dedicated developers who will
be working entirely on this project (Anthony in Canada and Ellie in
Melbourne), and volunteers putting in whatever time they can as well.
I've also grabbed part-time commitments from a few of the FastMail staff
to help out.

With these resources available, I propose a very aggressive timeline:

March 1st: Cyrus 2.5 release.  I'll cut a beta tomorrow, and then
another one next Friday.  Get your testing on :)  The goal is to be a
clean upgrade path from
2.4, incorporating many of the fixes since then which were too invasive
  to backport, but no surprises.

(... every 2 weeks or so, a new 2.5 point release with bugfixes)

May 1st: Cyrus 3.0 technology preview.  I will present this at the Kolab
summit in The Hauge on the 2nd-3rd, with whatever is ready by this time.

July 20th: Cyrus 3.0 release.  We'll have Docker Images / Virtual
Machines / Packages for major operating systems/distributions, along
with the documentation to set up a working mail system.  This will be
quite opinionated.  Cyrus 3.0 will be quite opinionated.  We'll probably
be discarding a ton of configuration options in exchange for simplicity
and reliability.

And we won't stop there, but that's as far as I'm planning today.

KICKOFF MEETING:

We will hold our first meeting as the new Cyrus team at 10am Melbourne
time tomorrow, Friday 20th.  Timezone info:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Cyrus+Kickoff+Meeting&iso=20150220T10&p1=152&ah=1
or http://goo.gl/ryQToF

Video/Audio chat via appearin:

https://appear.in/cyrus

Side channel will be the #cyrus IRC channel on Freenode:

https://cyrusimap.org/mediawiki/index.php/Cyrus_IRC

Minutes will be posted to the cyrus-devel mailing list:

https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cyrus-devel

Everybody is welcome to join in, either via IRC or video.  Please use a
headset and remain muted when you aren't speaking - and we may find that
we have most people turn off video depending on how everyone's bandwidth
goes.  We find it works quite well with just audio.  I will have a webcam
pointing at the big whiteboard in the FastMail boardroom, and use that for
note taking.  There will be a scribe in IRC as well.

It's not a big deal if you can't make it.  I'm planning to do two
meetings per week, one on Tuesday and one on Friday Australian time
(Monday/Thursday for Europe/US) as well as setting aside a couple of
blocks of "office hours" when I am available for anyone who has
questions - either development or operational.

I'm really excited about this new phase of Cyrus development, and I look
forward to working with everyone and doing great things!

Cheers,

Bron.

-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong at fastmail.fm