theKompany.com Releases Version 1.2 of Aethera

theKompany.com has announced the 1.2 release of Aethera, a personal information management suite for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. Aethera is commercial Free Software available at no cost under the GNU GPL with some proprietry plugins available to add extra features. Calendaring support is provided by the popular KOrganizer application from KDE. It supports a number of groupware servers including KDE sister project Kolab.

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Comments

by RMS (not verified)

and commercial GPL software?

That's an oxymoron.

How can you sell GPLed software, since the 1st person you sell it to can distribute it freely!

Am I missing something?

by blacksheep (not verified)

Aethera is commercial Free Software available at no cost under the GNU GPL with some proprietry plugins available to add extra features.

by ac (not verified)

It's been said before, but yes, you're missing something.

There are companies that sell commercial GPL software and manage to post consistent profits. The value of third-party redistributed code drops precipitously when that third party can't support the software as well as the original vendor. Also keep in mind that only someone who has purchased your product can create and distribute derivative works--if you don't sell your software to people with software development interests, the risk is low.

The former is why RedHat (only one example) continues to do well in spite of many RedHat-derived distros.

So I think it's pretty much settled that you CAN make money selling GPL software. The only question is how much money can you make before you erode your advantage over your potential sublicensees. And that's what you go to business school to learn.

by David Walser (not verified)

It's funny the initials you would use to post that message. One of the first things the real RMS was doing in the early days of the GPL was selling copies of Emacs.

by verstehichnich (not verified)

You miss something ;-)

by Jon Scobie (not verified)

But with Kontact, evolution etc. now very mature and doing more than aethera, who cares?
Aethera was in there before all the other PIMs we now have but I think the product was dead in the water quite a while back.

Which of those run on Windows?

OK, this is my third attempt at responding to your question and I've contradicted myself so many times that I now see one feasible reason why you would want to use Aethera. If your company was heavily cross platform (mixed windows/linux desktops say) and wanted to use a groupware server that could be used in both environments, then maybe I see your point. However, I see this as quite a small market but I stand to be corrected on this.
Most businesses plum for one or the other. My point was that if you are an MS shop, you'll be using Outlook. If a linux one, why buy Aethera?
If you are migrating your desktops, so many options ...

by Shawn Gordon (not verified)

No one is selling Aethera, it is free. We are selling the optional plug ins such as instant messaging and whiteboarding and Voice over IP, these are all multiple platform and there isn't anything else going that, not to mention the Citadel and Kolab support.

With Windows XP, who cares for MacOS X?
With OpenOffice, who cares for KOffice?
With KDE, who cares for GNOME?
With Intel, who cares for AMD?
With KTM, who cares for Honda?
...
Maybe it's good to have a choice?!?

The posting claims that it supports "a number of groupware servers", the announcement just mentions support for two, Kolab and Citadel:

http://www.thekompany.com/press_media/full.php3?Id=278

Does it support Kolab 2 or just Kolab 1?

What other servers does it support, OpenGroupware or phpGroupware?

Kolab1 only
Citadel
More Aethera has support for Shared Folders for both above servers.

No OpenGroupware and phpGroupware support yet.
So, you are right there is support for only 2 groupware servers now.

by mr98ai (not verified)

What's with all this "if you are using windows you are using Outlook" stuff anyway? Outlook is horrible (from a security standpoint), and we need all the alternatives we can get.