Will dovecot always be open FREE source for all?

I am currently migrating my www.digipanel.com from Courier to dovecot as I think courier is overly complicated and a pain in the arse to manage all those files.

anyways, I have dovecot IMAP working with MySQL auth but reading the Maildir each time takes up to 30 secs to complete.

ANy ideas why? Maybe a dns resolve issue? how can I fix..