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
