If you have been on twitter lately, you noticed several things going on with Citrix, its customers and the community in general.

I am talking about the cumbersome, borderline stupid license reactivation process that Citrix decided to implement (now rolled back to an acceptable and intelligent process) and of course the trial licenses for certain products, that Citrix now decided to get rid of (the licenses, not the products).

Of course, these licenses, for people in the community like myself, are important. They allow us to test products and in many cases, test these at a larger scale (i.e., a bandwidth limited non-expiring ADC license is not as good as an unlimited bandwidth one that expires after 15-days – same for a CVAD license). Most of the time we test these things to understand their limits and how they operate in all aspects at scale. Keep in mind that I do not necessarily mean or advocate that we all need unlimited licenses. I mean a 99-user license for CVAD will certainly be enough for most people testing stuff in a lab. Same for an ADC license at 100Mbits.

So what all this has to do with the title of this post? Well, the relationship between Citrix and the Community and more than that, what Citrix thinks or believes the community is.

As many know I was a Citrix CTP for almost 10 years (9 to be exact) and I actually decided to leave the program on my own. Yearly you have to provide Citrix ‘proof’ that you were an active member of the community (how they measure and quantify that is probably worth a blog post). WIth that in mind, I can safely say based on my first-hand experience with them for close to 10 years that for Citrix, Community means CTPs and CTAs. Nothing else. People like you and me that do help the ‘Community’, share our scars so you do not have to get yours and so on, are not ‘Community’ and for that reason, we are left out.

Typical examples here: CTPs have no issues getting trial licenses, NFR ones and so on. Everyone else, now, cannot even get trial licenses for certain products. Same thing about severely limited licenses like the ADC developer one. What is quite odd as many in the community that are not CTPs do have way more ‘lab’ power than most CTPs (i.e., I do have a full Citrix ADC SDX at home with 20 VPX instances). The bottom line is no matter which title you have in the community, the proper tools and licenses for the community should be there, not only from Citrix but from all vendors.

Other vendors at least came up with paid licenses (what we discussed MULTIPLE times and even brought it up to Citrix with ZERO response) that allow you to run a decent lab (i.e., VMware with its VMUG Advantage one). Or even Microsoft with their Action Pack that includes USD 1200 on Azure credits.

For whatever reason, Citrix refuses to come up with something similar, that would extend their reach into the real community (and not only their CTPs/CTAs). It is plain stupid if you ask me. Ideally you want to put your product in the hands of as many people as possible. You want them to learn about these and then spread the word about it so more and more people in the community become familiar with it what will certainly make its way into the enterprises and customers these people work for or with. It is that simple.

Now why they cannot see this and refuse to do anything about it, is beyond me. But it shows they do not give a shit about anything outside their CTP/CTA bubble (and trust me on this – being there is not what you think about it; been there, done that).

Will this post change anything? Certainly not. We discussed this several times in the community and every single time all we have heard was some sort of bullshit along the lines ‘We are currently evaluating how to better serve or interact with the community’ what in real words mean ‘We could not care less about your tiny irrelevant existence so F*** OFF‘.

Happy Friday to you too. Now back to my large scale WVD issues…

CR