Dovecot Oy merger with Open-Xchange AG

[Patrick Coffin]

To Timo and the Dovecot guys - congratulations!  I'm sure this merger with OpenXchange is going to provide you with a lot of resources and opportunities.

As a longtime user of dovecot, I do have a few concerns.  I wonder if you can answer some questions for me.

You say that OpenXchange really likes open source and shares your plans for the future.  Is this a commitment that future versions core dovecot product will remain free and truly open source? 

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange#Licensing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange#Licensing>) , OpenXchange's backend is GPL'd, but the front-end is not - it's released under "Creative Common's Share Alike, Non Commercial, Attribution".  The article points out: 
     "The restriction to Non Commercial in the Creative Commons license for the Frontend restricts re-distribution to third parties, i.e. hosted deployments for third parties. However, since the front-end license prohibits commercial re-distribution, the software is neither free software nor open source software since the definitions of both require such re-distribution to be permitted"

Do you expect that dovecot is moving in that direction?

Here's why I'm asking:  As a hosted email provider, I've long used dovecot, and been quite happy with it.  But I have some concerns, as is common when any popular open source project gets acquired by a commercial entitiy.

The current dovecot license is a mixture of the MIT and LGPL licenses.  Will this remain?  Or is dovecot going to go the way of OpenXchange licensing?   

What about other pieces of the dovecot ecosystem, such as the Object Storage plugin - will that remain closed source and proprietary?  Or will you follow the lead of companies like RedHat and be truly open source? 

Is there a possibility that future versions of dovecot that contain what we might consider core features will be available only in the commercial version of the product?

If I base a part of my business on a piece of software I've been running for the last 10 years, am I going to find myself in trouble in a year or two, when some new version of dovecot comes out with changes that I need, and I have to move to a commercial product, which I may or may not be able to afford?

I'd love to hear that you're going to be following a model like RedHat did when they acquired GlusterFS and created the RedHat Storage Server.  Gluster development is still going strong, and still completely open source.  But they make money from people like me who know that by buying a contract, we can get the kind of support we need for such a critical part of our infrastructure.

Again, congratulations and, as always, thanks for all the hard work creating dovecot in the first place.

Patrick