To Timo and the Dovecot guys - congratulations! I'm sure this merger with
OpenXchange is going to provide you with a lot of resources and opportunities.
As a longtime user of dovecot, I do have a few concerns. I wonder if you can
answer some questions for me.
You say that OpenXchange really likes open source and shares your plans for the
future. Is this a commitment that future versions core dovecot product will
remain free and truly open source?
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange#Licensing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange#Licensing>) , OpenXchange's
backend is GPL'd, but the front-end is not - it's released under
"Creative Common's Share Alike, Non Commercial, Attribution". The
article points out:
"The restriction to Non Commercial in the Creative Commons license for
the Frontend restricts re-distribution to third parties, i.e. hosted deployments
for third parties. However, since the front-end license prohibits commercial
re-distribution, the software is neither free software nor open source software
since the definitions of both require such re-distribution to be permitted"
Do you expect that dovecot is moving in that direction?
Here's why I'm asking: As a hosted email provider, I've long used
dovecot, and been quite happy with it. But I have some concerns, as is common
when any popular open source project gets acquired by a commercial entitiy.
The current dovecot license is a mixture of the MIT and LGPL licenses. Will
this remain? Or is dovecot going to go the way of OpenXchange licensing?
What about other pieces of the dovecot ecosystem, such as the Object Storage
plugin - will that remain closed source and proprietary? Or will you follow the
lead of companies like RedHat and be truly open source?
Is there a possibility that future versions of dovecot that contain what we
might consider core features will be available only in the commercial version of
the product?
If I base a part of my business on a piece of software I've been running for
the last 10 years, am I going to find myself in trouble in a year or two, when
some new version of dovecot comes out with changes that I need, and I have to
move to a commercial product, which I may or may not be able to afford?
I'd love to hear that you're going to be following a model like RedHat
did when they acquired GlusterFS and created the RedHat Storage Server. Gluster
development is still going strong, and still completely open source. But they
make money from people like me who know that by buying a contract, we can get
the kind of support we need for such a critical part of our infrastructure.
Again, congratulations and, as always, thanks for all the hard work creating
dovecot in the first place.
Patrick
On 23 Mar 2015, at 19:41, Patrick Coffin <patrick at coffininc.com> wrote:> > > To Timo and the Dovecot guys - congratulations! I'm sure this merger with OpenXchange is going to provide you with a lot of resources and opportunities. > > As a longtime user of dovecot, I do have a few concerns. I wonder if you can answer some questions for me.I could probably give better answers after talking to other people, but for now:> You say that OpenXchange really likes open source and shares your plans for the future. Is this a commitment that future versions core dovecot product will remain free and truly open source?I haven't heard anyone at OX asking us to close down anything or change any licenses.> The current dovecot license is a mixture of the MIT and LGPL licenses. Will this remain? Or is dovecot going to go the way of OpenXchange licensing?It would be difficult to change Dovecot license at this point since there are so many outside contributions owning copyrights.> What about other pieces of the dovecot ecosystem, such as the Object Storage plugin - will that remain closed source and proprietary? Or will you follow the lead of companies like RedHat and be truly open source? > > Is there a possibility that future versions of dovecot that contain what we might consider core features will be available only in the commercial version of the product? > > If I base a part of my business on a piece of software I've been running for the last 10 years, am I going to find myself in trouble in a year or two, when some new version of dovecot comes out with changes that I need, and I have to move to a commercial product, which I may or may not be able to afford?What you have now won't be taken away. IMAP hasn't changed much for a long time, so I think it's unlikely that a new version would have something that you really can't live without. BTW. PowerDNS also announced their merger with Open-Xchange today. I think that should also be reassuring that there is now another open source project that is happy about their OX-merger. http://blog.powerdns.com/2015/03/24/powerdns-and-open-xchange-agree-to-merge/
On 3/25/15, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:> On 23 Mar 2015, at 19:41, Patrick Coffin <patrick at coffininc.com> wrote: >> >> >> To Timo and the Dovecot guys - congratulations! I'm sure this merger with >> OpenXchange is going to provide you with a lot of resources and >> opportunities. >> >> As a longtime user of dovecot, I do have a few concerns. I wonder if you >> can answer some questions for me. > > I could probably give better answers after talking to other people, but for > now:So you no longer have the final say with dovecot.> > What you have now won't be taken away. IMAP hasn't changed much for a long > time, so I think it's unlikely that a new version would have something that > you really can't live without. >So there *is* a chance it will be commercialised