On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 10:29 +0100, Thomas Koch wrote:
somebody from the kolab groupware project recently explained me that the Bus- Factor[1] of around 1 would be one of their primary reasons not to use Dovecot and stick with Cyrus.
What do you think about that? Is the bus factor much higher then 1?
I've created a company for Dovecot support, and if all goes well we should have at least one other coder in not too distant future (anyone want a job? :)
Also besides me there's already at least Stephan Bosch who has written Dovecot's Sieve/ManageSieve implementations. I don't know if he'd take care of the whole Dovecot if I happened to die right now, but at least he knows the code pretty well. There are also a few big companies that have some people who have done some Dovecot coding.
Also the Bus-Factor of Cyrus doesn't seem to be much higher than 1 to me. AFAIK there's only a single person currently developing it actively (plus I guess a few more not-very-active developers from CMU).
Somehow related: Since the free software world[2] slowly converges towards GIT as the "one and only" VCS, have you thought about a switch? It's much more likely that somebody checks out your code, looks into it and provides patches if the VCS is already installed.
I'm not as much against git anymore as I was when I switched to hg, but I don't see much benefits in switching to git either. I highly doubt I'd get even a single patch more if I used git instead of hg.
The biggest problem with lack of patches is that few people are interested in coding a mail server. You can see the same with all open source IMAP/SMTP servers (and probably commercial ones too). Nearly always there's only a single guy who has written almost all of it.