Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 23:39:35 +0100
From: Ben Bucksch <mozilla.news@bucksch.org>
To: mozilla-announce@mozilla.org
Subject: Beonex

I'm happy to announce Beonex, an open-source Mozilla distribution for 
end-users.

Beonex Communicator is based on Mozilla Communicator, currently 
code-named SeaMonkey.


  Intentions
  
My intentions for creating Beonex were mainly 2 (which also lead to the 
character of Beonex):


    Open-source
    
mozilla.org is chartered to produce source code only, enabling 
distributors (or "vendors") to create applications based on Mozilla 
code. While fulfilling this role, it also creates binaries, but 
officially, they are only intended for testing, not end-users.

This manifests itself in several places:

    * Often debugging code enabled, not optimal download size
    * Default profiles/preferences are targetted at developers and testers.
    * Very technical website and "pre-usage"-documentation (feature 
      description, installation instructions etc.)
    * No user support (e.g. no mailing-list / newsgroup for user questions)
      
All this makes Mozilla binaries unsuited for the mass-market. However, 
it was my goal, and I hope the goal of many other non-Netscape Mozilla 
contributors, to create an "open-source" application for end-users, one 
that "mom and dad" can use without hand-holding.

With "open-source", I mean here not only the legal meaning, but also the 
"spirit" - open-source projects usually do things differently than large 
commercial vendors, incl. default settings and hookups to websites 
(which concern me for privacy and security reasons). To pick a prominent 
example: "Allow JS in Mailnews".

Apart from some packages for Linux distributions, nobody yet did take 
over this task, so I did.

Support for private users will be offered on a community basis similar 
to many open-source projects (including Mozilla) and the "nuggies" 
(Netscape user newsgroups), via a mailing list, IRC and other methods I 
didn't think of.

I spent a lot of time in the last 2+ weeks to create the websites and 
the package. Much more to come. Help welcome, especially for 
documentation (you will find "To be written" and similar sections on the 
website).


    Corporate market
    
Netscape completely neglets the business customers, especially in 
Mailnews. I consider this being an error, for 2 reasons:

    * I think, users want to use the same application at work and at 
      home, to leverage existing knowledge.
    * I don't want to recieve HTML-in-MS-Outlook-flavor emails in the 
      future. I may not need MSIE to surf the web, but I would need it 
      together with MS Outlook in order to read my mail. -> Standards 
      support in mail is just as important as it is on the web.
      
Netscape evaluated that a lot of features are necessary to win business 
users, e.g. LDAP, S/MIME, Roaming and SSL-enabling various protocols. 
However, from my observation, it looks like basic LDAP support could win 
a lot of customers in this area.

That's why I would like to implement at least LDAP syncronization. 
However, I am not willing to do this on my own, in my free time ("not 
this time!"). That's why I will try to get development funding from 
companies who need LDAP support and don't want to switch to Microsoft.

Also, I will offer commercial support for Beonex. This will enable me to 
pay the servers and employees necessary to bring Beonex to the users and 
fund "maintainance" of Mozilla - development of bugfixes and selected 
features, especially those that are not so interesting for Netscape.

I intend to recruit the "employees" (support staff, release engineers, 
developers etc.) as-needed, mostly from the Mozilla community.


  Releases
  
The first binaries will be called Beonex Communicator 0.6 Preview and 
based on the Netscape_20000922_BRANCH (Netscape 6.0) branch. That's 
mainly because this provides a known level of quality for end-users. 
Beonex Communicator 0.6 Preview will be released simultanously with 
Netscape 6.0.

Depending on the demand, subsequent 0.* releases will be based on the 
Mozilla trunk.

Beonex Communicator 1.0 is targetted somewhere around Mozilla 1.0, 
depending on the quality of Mozilla 1.0.


  Community
  
You are welcome to send Mozilla end-users to Beonex.

For obvious reasons, the opinion of the Mozilla community matters a lot 
to me. So, feedback is welcome, even if it's only "cool" or "buh" (but 
the latter with reasons, please :) ). Followup-To .general or send mail 
to <feedback@beonex.org>.

OK, check it out yourself: <http://www.beonex.com> 
<http://www.beonex.org>. I have Release Candidates, and I would be glad, 
if you could test them thoroughly.