Michael Dasenbrock wrote, On 11.7.2008 18:44:

Hello there,

I'm an engineer investigating a new project here at Apple. We are considering using Dovecot in our Mac OS X server product, and I was hoping you could help clarify a couple of issues regarding licensing. We're equipped to handle most of the requirements of the Lesser General Public License 2.1 and your other open source licenses (e.g. MIT, etc), but we wanted to check with you about certain areas prior to our potential use.

1. Are you the sole copyright owner of Dovecot? If not, who else should we contact?
   No. I am completely baffled why you are asking me these questions, I am CC'ing the Dovecot mailing list where you are more likely to get these questions answered.

2. To the extent that Apple made any changes to Dovecot and released these outside of Apple, we would release the source code to those changes under the LGPL. Does this align with your understanding as well? We are happy to provide the changes, BTW.

3. In terms of proprietary code that links dynamically to LGPL¹d libraries, is it your understanding that there are no requirements imposed on the proprietary software itself in terms of having to open-source the proprietary software or to allow reverse engineering of the proprietary software? For example, if Apples¹ [[insert proprietary code example]] links to the LGPL code in Dovecot Mail Server, would that code be subject to the above requirements?

4. Do you have any plans to release Dovecot (or new modifications, versions) under LGPL 3 or do you plan to stay with LGPL 2.1?

Thanks for your contributions to the Open Source Software community. We hope that it will work out to work together.

Sincerely, Michael Dasenbrock

-- VH