Dovecot Oy merger with Open-Xchange AG

[Andreas Kasenides]

I hate to have started this, especially the "sister" thread that has 
dissented into a flame war of what is OSS.

Let me say that I believe there is nothing wrong trying to make money on 
ones efforts. Actually it is a must. How can anyone continue to put 
efforts into a project when there is no reward? Especially when most of 
the effort is by a single individual. Secondly there comes a point in 
time when any project needs help to advance. Any one individual will be 
unable to manage all the things that need to be done. It will either 
become a team effort of individuals employed elsewhere or somehow enter 
the commercial sector in some form. Both of these models have many 
examples out there and in the mean time maintaining their OSS root and 
community.

What I was mostly worried about was a sudden and rapid commercialization 
of the project in such a way that it completely disappears from the OSS 
community. I will give you an extreme example that we had the pleasure 
to be involved as payed customers and debugging contributors: 
KnowledgeTree DMS.  If you do not know the story you will simply not 
find it. After years of the community contributing to the project a 
sudden shift to complete commercialization destroyed the project 
entirely: ie sourceforge project closed, source code disappeared, 
mailing lists vanished even the domain name name closed down. If it 
wasn't for third party storage/downloading sites the project source code 
would have been practically non-existent. I consider such behavior 
firstly immoral since a project's success is not only its design but 
largely also its debugging, mostly done by thousands of unknown helpers 
writing their experiences and problems in mailing lists.

I hope Timo manages well, keeps the community going but also makes a 
living (or a ton of money ) out of Dovecot. He deserves it. It is not 
impossible, others have done so successfully.


On 25/03/15 22:46, Daniel Miller wrote:
> On 3/19/2015 3:26 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Today I can finally announce that Dovecot Oy company has merged with 
>> Open-Xchange AG. This helps us to get more Dovecot developers, 
>> support people and so on. Most importantly, eventually it should 
>> allow me to get back to doing what I like the most: Designing new and 
>> interesting stuff for Dovecot and perfecting the old stuff :) OX is a 
>> great match to Dovecot going forward. They also really like open 
>> source and share our plans for the future. Nothing big will change as 
>> a result of this merger: Dovecot will stay Dovecot with its own name 
>> and release schedules. We're not going to force OX and Dovecot to be 
>> the same product, other than having a somewhat deeper integration 
>> between them.
>>
>
> My initial impression is...sounds great!  Then, after further thought, 
> and watching the flame war, I've changed my mind to...sounds great!
>
> I'm operating under the assumption that you are continuing to be in 
> charge of Dovecot and will choose what and how to implement changes 
> and fixes.  I'm further operating under the assumption that you may 
> choose to have certain features, appropriate for larger installations, 
> that you will want to receive compensation for from your users.  And 
> I'm assuming that by having OX behind you, those initial assumptions 
> remain - Dovecot remains your baby, you will grow it as you see fit - 
> but now you've got some financial backing that allows you more freedom 
> to continue to develop Dovecot for general-purpose use while 
> reasonably having certain features developed to support the paid model.
>
> If I'm mistaken then please correct me - but I'm seeing nothing but 
> upside.  Certainly for you, and if you were to abandon open source 
> Dovecot today (which I've seen absolutely no indication) you've 
> already provided a tool that has a significant user base and you 
> deserve to be rewarded for it.  But based on your previous actions and 
> your original post, and I have no reason not to take you at your word, 
> this sounds like a win/win for Dovecot developers and users. 
> Congratulations!
>