Dovecot Oy merger with Open-Xchange AG

[Timo Sirainen]

On 23 Mar 2015, at 19:41, Patrick Coffin <patrick at coffininc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

I could probably give better answers after talking to other people, but for now:

> 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? 

I haven't heard anyone at OX asking us to close down anything or change any licenses.

> 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?   

It would be difficult to change Dovecot license at this point since there are so many outside contributions owning copyrights.

> 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?

What you have now won't be taken away. IMAP hasn't changed much for a long time, so I think it's unlikely that a new version would have something that you really can't live without.

BTW. PowerDNS also announced their merger with Open-Xchange today. I think that should also be reassuring that there is now another open source project that is happy about their OX-merger. http://blog.powerdns.com/2015/03/24/powerdns-and-open-xchange-agree-to-merge/