Thank you. :)
I truly believe that this will be beneficial for everyone.
To state the obvious, there's always a battle in such arrangements between the bottom line and satisfying expectations, and over time, the bottom line always wins when you are playing with someone else's money.
Your approach to the business to date has been strikingly similar to open source in many ways, and in other ways customer service-centric in nature or just good old fashioned business. Neither one of these maximizes profits, and when it's your baby, you can make the choice between making decisions that generate more money and more customers or greater personal satisfaction whether or not it is in spite of profits.
I also recognize the value of the argument that says with more resources, capabilities can be expanded at a much faster rate, and for what you might lose to the bottom line, you gain from these capabilities. There is no doubt that limited resources have impacted capabilities to date, though mostly in terms of management and ease of use and not in terms of spam blocking when in capable hands.
I hope that Barry and Charles both understand that Declude is not an inexpensive product and I'm sure that everyone around here expects a continuation of the same principals, or in the very least an upfront disclosure of any plans to derivative from the existing model. Speaking for myself, I've been developing a new business and making decisions based on the existing model, and some changes made at the top can cause my business a great deal of harm. I hope that they also respect the contributions of the community in respect to development, and the value that this represents to the business as a whole. You need look no further than the IMail forum for an example of what happens when you virtually abandon the hardcore followers of a product. I've experienced similar changes a few times, and invariably the bean counters win out over the community and their unique needs, though this tends to take some time and these were also big time buyouts. HomeSite for instance followed much the same path to date with Declude, and Allaire then Macromedia teamed up to harm the product from virtually every avenue while adding expense to the users. When I decided to go with Declude for my new business, I really decided to go with R. Scott Perry.
My hope here is that the new owners maintain and expand the extensibility of the product by putting as many capabilities as possible in the hands of the power users (expanded external filter support and deep customization), while at the same time I imagine they seek to simplify administration for those with less time and interest, and that they don't change for the worse the way the product is licensed for those seeking high volumes.
For the short-term, I'm cautiously optimistic about the changes this might bring, but I hope the new owners respect the fact that there are many other businesses out there that will be directly impacted by many of their decisions. I hope that both Barry and Charles are members of this list so that they can see first hand what has driven the product to date, and clarify any issues that may arise about the direction of your business in relation to ours. My own biggest concern would be a change at any point in the future that would make Declude significantly more expensive (such as per-user licensing), but at the same time I would be relieved by new energy directed at things like for instance a product for MS SMTP gateways and expanded MIME parsing capabilities without significant impact on performance.
Regardless of my long-winded cautious optimism, I expect that you got what you deserved from your hard work and very long hours over the years in bringing Declude from it's infancy to what it is now, and for that you get a big (and repeated) congratulations. I'm also very, very thankful that it wasn't Ipswitch, or heaven forbid, Microsoft, that bought you out :)
Matt
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