Dovecot Oy merger with Open-Xchange AG

[Asai]

Agreed.  I think this is a positive move for Dovecot and Timo, Mikko, et 
al.  I think only good will come of this for open source communications.

On 3/25/15 2:46 PM, Andreas Kasenides wrote:
> 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!
>>

-- 
--asai