OpenVPN Technologies & OpenVPN Community Relationship

[ecrist]

Many users may be unaware that, currently, OpenVPN Technologies, who owns the copyrights to OpenVPN, has an extremely limited involvement with the community of users. OpenVPN Technologies has attempted, in the past, to create a forum, wiki, and other resources, but all failed. There was no maintenance, no dedicated staff, and no promotion of these resources.

In August of 2008, myself and a few other users took the initiative and created these resources. We organized and maintain ##openvpn on Freenode, we created this forum, and we maintain dedicated wiki pages to account for setup examples and FAQs. We have attempted to work with OpenVPN Technologies to get more official support, or at least links to our resources for the community. These were met with a combination of hostility and disregard.

The first week of January, 2010, we were contacted via IRC by OpenVPN Technologies, and they want to work with the community to create a more traditional open source project. They desire to produce a commercial product, known as Access Server, but want to nurture community patches and code contributions. It is hoped this will unite a project which is has been rather fractured and on the verge of a fork for some time.

There have been two meetings to discuss this new relationship with the community on IRC. On January 11, 2010, there was a discussion related to how the community and company can intermingle, and what resources would assist in that endeavor. The log for that conversation can be seen at:
* ##openvpn-discussion log 11-Jan-2010 (text w/unix line endings)

The other meeting was held on January 12, 2010, and discussed the development side of OpenVPN, and how the community can better participate with it. Topics included version control system, bug tracking, and the like. Logs for this conversation can be downloaded from:
* ##openvpn-discussion log 12-Jan-2010 (text w/unix line endings)

I hope we can make this new relationship work!

[krzee]

The log for that conversation can be seen at:
* ##openvpn-discussion log 11-Jan-2010 (text w/unix line endings)

for googles sake, the wiki has all the meetings here:
https://www.secure-computing.net/wiki/i ... C_meetings

I hope we can make this new relationship work!

+1

[samuli]

... and now after ~7 months we have new official forums maintained jointly by people from ovpnforum.com and from OpenVPN Technologies. The new relationship seems to have worked great so far .

Thanks for the entire ovpnforum.com staff for providing forums service for OpenVPN users - and for working together with us (=the company) to make it even better!

Samuli Seppänen
Community Manager
OpenVPN Technologies, Inc