A common question we frequently get, is if there is a community version of Kopano. Of course there is! Kopano is Open Source Software. There is a difference in how to get Kopano software as a paying customer or a community member.
Kopano for customers
Part of the services we deliver to our customers are quality assured packages (QA) and easiness of maintenance. These packages are made available through our repositories, which make it easy for you to keep your Kopano up to date using the tools provided by your operating system. Three repositories are available:
- ‘Master’, which contains nightly builds, the latest development version
- ‘Pre-final’, which contains packages currently going through the QA process. It contains non-final releases such as beta and RC releases.
- ‘Final’, which contains fully QA’d packages which have been released and announced as final on the Kopano site
As a customer you have access to all three repositories. Most of our customers use the final repository.
Alternatively, the Kopano portal (and later, on the Kopano Dashboard) you can also access a download section. This section contains tarballs with quality assured packages for all supported distributions, as well as additional (generally client-side) features such as the Kopano DeskApp and the Kopano Outlook Extension.
Kopano for our community
Community members do not have access to these repositories. Ready to use packages, built for your many different operating systems and architectures are available through https://download.kopano.io/community. These packages are based on the master branch, meaning that it contains the latest features currently in development, but might also contain some bugs.
In addition, the complete source code of the Kopano projects is available at https://stash.kopano.io. This means you can also build your own packages for your distribution/architecture. Several community-driven initiatives already exist, and they make life easy. Members of the Debian community have a project that provides packages (see https://salsa.debian.org/giraffe-team), as well as the OpenSuSE community (see https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/server:mail:kopano).
Another very easy way to have a fast and easy deployment of Kopano is to get it from the Univention App-Center. Univention is a Debian-based platform, which is available for free in the Core-Edition. At https://www.univention.de/produkte/univention-app-center/app-katalog/kopano-core/ you find images of virtual machines to directly run Kopano on Univention.
Summary
As open source product Kopano is available for everyone. Customers benefit from quality assured, supported up-to-date packages and easy roll-out / update – mechanisms. For the community all kind of download channels are open. Next to the existing packages the available source code hopefully motivates other communities to implement it as well.
