September 16, 2009, 9:58 am
Back in August, Canadian company Point Clark Networks announced major changes in the marketing strategy for their main product; a Linux-based small business server called ClarkConnect, which was available as a free community edition or as a paid-for enterprise version. The company also sold related services, such as central monitoring, spam and virus protection. Now ClearOS – a Linux-based small business server and successor to ClarkConnect, will be free to use, with the income stream generated from related services.
The Point Clark Network portfolio will now be expanded and will strike out in a new direction. A foundation, the ClearFoundation, will in future be responsible for maintaining the software, a pre-release version of which will be released this month under the name ClearOS version 5.1 (succeeding ClarkConnect 5.0). The foundation will be chaired by John H. Terpstra, a long-serving member of the Samba development team and an untiring evangelist for all things open source. It’s hoped that the foundation will inject new impetus into the community…