Okay, I've read the e-mail a few times and I think I understand what's going on here. @mail realizes that no matter what they'll always have to compete with RC, so what they want to do, in essence, is put an @mail t-shirt on RC, so that wherever RC goes it will be advertising their competing product. And they want to pay Thomas to allow them to put that t-shirt on, and to integrate some of their feature into roundcube (or vice-versa - doesnt' really matter since they'll be the same thing)
This is all up-side it seems to me. Thomas get's some money, and free trips to Australia. RC get's renamed (who cares?) and get's some new features. If @mail would be willing to pay you to rename and rebrand RC and the website, and then have their engineers submit patches to you the same as anyone else, I think that would be great. On the other hand if you're going to rebrand RC for cash, you might as well offer the same deal to @mail's competitors and see if you can get a better deal! If @mail wants to take control of the source and community with the purpose of choking and killing it, then as has been suggested, roundcube will simply pop back up with a new name. In conclusion, don't be afraid to make a buck off of all the hard work you've done, but get a lawyer and consider the real possibility of a set-back in the project if @mail doesn't work in good faith. -Charles Paul Waring wrote: > On 26/07/06, Thomas Bruederli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Just wanted to forward a mail I've got yesterday and would like to >> hear your opinions about this topic. Either this could make RoundCube >> grow faster or atmail just wants to get rid of some (more and more >> serious) competition. > > Their home page reads: > > "Filtering out the white noise of growing open-source options, @Mail > is a reliable and complete messaging platform that includes full > source code for complete control." > > Doesn't sound as if they're terribly keen on open source to me... > > Anyway, if they want the advantages/features of Roundcube, they can > take them, provided they abide by the terms of the GPL. I don't see > why they'd have to license the name or buy the domain if they just > want to improve and open source their existing product. There's also > nothing to stop them offering commercial support for Roundcube if they > want, as far as I'm aware that's perfectly legitimate under the GPL. > > Paul > >
