October 2011 Enterprise Working Group Call

Meeting Notes

• Do people want to do it or not in Mozilla? Is it a democracy? How will it be decided? We are pragmatic. We have a bunch of people for it, bunch of people that don't want to do it because it's a lot of work. We want to make sure we understand all the concerns and info and how many people it will help, so we can make a good decision. It affects a lot of people (development, release engineering, QA, etc) and there will be risks. Decision will be made by the folks that will be involved in the work - Kev is driving. Not made by board or steering committee.
• When Mozilla says they don't have resources, it seems disingenuous. Skills, time, particular individuals and many groups are needed. The people that can do these patches and reviews are a small group. Mozilla doesn't have the numbers and info to understand the impact of adding enteprise features.
• Need clear tools. i.e. deployment tools for patches.
• Downstream products such as Thunderbird are directly impacted with the Firefox ESR decision
• Mozilla needs real contributor involvement to figure out things like requirements for MSI/GPO; This is not a core competency for Mozilla, but it is for enterprise users.
• Red Hat used to to do long term support but didn't get the support they needed from Mozilla to continue. Red Hat finds that people want to go 1-2 years between upgrades. They see people now pick a version and stay on it for a year, "security be damned".
• When asked about the current policy and 42 weeks, 42 weeks is better! (longer is better)
• People would like minimum to be 1 year. Based on feedback from folks on this list, Mozilla thinks 42 weeks is doable. Need to know if it's not.
• Some feedback/request for a consistent calendar date.
• Get ESR rolling and tweak it from there.
• Feedback is mostly positive. If there are particular parts of the proposal that are unworkable, please let us know on dev.planning, on the mailing list or in email to Kev or Stormy.
• Kev is incorporating all feedback and taking a decision in the next week or so. All feedback needed ASAP!

Topics for next time:

• How do we go about implementing this. What can we do to help out?