Future of mailcow

hanneskannes

Food for thought for anyone who commits any amount of free time to work on mailcow:

Mailcow has recently been sold to “The Infrastructure Company GmbH”. The details and implications of that deal are not being disclosed transparently, and there’s NO commitment to keep a community edition of mailcow publicly available and free forever. The only one cashing in on all your free work is André Peters, and he or the company can pull the plug at any time. This is not meant to be a personal attack, it’s just the facts.

As someone who has seen this happen over and over, here’s free advice: If this thread doesn’t get deleted, use it as a starting point to discuss the future of mailcow as a free and open source piece of software. If that does not happen, it should be seen as a big red flag and get you to look elsewhere (or create a fork) before committing any more free time towards the project.

Here’s the original announcement as reference (source):

mailcow, including me, will be part of “The Infrastructure Company GmbH”. No, mailcow will not be discontinued. No, I will not stop to work on mailcow.
You will probably not notice the change at all. Hopefully we will be able to finally implement more features soon as there will be more time to work on mailcow.

We still rely heavily on your support (support contacts, SAL etc.) to continue mailcow as it is. As long as we don’t have a commercial plan or “paid version” of mailcow, that’s the only way for us to finance the work on mailcow.

diekuh

I don’t want to repeat it over and over. Nothing changes. Or did it? Where? When?

Please don’t be a drama queen. It’s not that MS bought mailcow. We are still just a simple, small team of a hand full of people. We have been working together in the past 2 years. Has anything changed in the past two years? I don’t think so.

I get less of the cake but will have a team to help me with mailcow. I will have a little bit more time and you better support. That’s it. I think that’s fine.

hanneskannes

Wow, already calling me names. That escalated quickly 😆 let’s stay civil, ok?

See, I’m not a long time user of mailcow. I like the software though, and would hate to see it go south. I don’t know you or your style of handling things, but when I read the announcement it was not clear what route the free/open source version of mailcow would go. You only stated that mailcow won’t be discontinued, nor will you stop working on it. And in the following paragraph you already talked about monetization. Again, it’s nothing personal, so please don’t feel so attacked.

Anyways, that’s where I’m coming from with this. A simple “Mailcow will be free and open source forever” would have been enough.

MAGIC

And even if mailcow will turn into a pay-only option, I am sure somebody will fork the entire project and keep going for people who doesn’t want to pay.

diekuh

It will not happen. mailcow is and will remain to be open source only.

It’s actually kind of sad for me to see people complaining about this step. It will help mailcow after all. Nothing will change about the philosophy.

We plan to offer HA setups with professional support. How work that work with only me doing support? No free time ever again? Who would want to have professional, business critical support with a single person? That’s insane.

To repeat it once more: I am still the person working on mailcow. The project was not given away. I am part of the company we moved mailcow into.

diekuh

Below I want to add an important remark, it’s more of a personal opinion about “monetization” and open source. 🙂 Please see it as such:

Talking about “the monetization”: Yes, I am talking about it and I am doing it since years. Do you think I am spending hours and hours every week for fun? Or that I like seeing companies using it without giving at least something back when they need support or hosted services?

That’s probably why most open source projects die. Who wants to work for other peoples profit for free forever? That’s not what open source is about. Not at all. If you think “I can have that for free” is the philosophy of open source, you are wrong.

Nothing you say “is facts” and I think it’s just ignorant to completely ignore the announcements and discussions we had about this.

Do you think moving to a GmbH means more people can work for your profit for free? It means much better support, many more resources and a stable future for mailcow. It does not mean that other projects will pay for mailcow. Just as before, we make profit of IT services. We sell the planning of IT infrastructures, IT support and services around it. When we offer mailcow support, it will not be for free. When we sell redundant mailcows, it will not be for free. You get this point? You exchange money for services.
mailcow makes profit by selling SALs (and I want to say thank you for everyone buying a SAL, it helps mailcow so much) and by selling support or managed services for a ridiculous low price (like 3 months of support for ₇₅ €, come on, which company offers a single hour IT support for that price?).

Look at Dovecot or SOGo and the companies behind it. Is Dovecot not open source anymore? Is SOGo not open source? Would you prefer seeing a single person on SOGo or Dovecot? I don’t think so.

The reason I am mad about this: I think many open source project died because of misunderstandings like these. And many projects keep dying because their owners are afraid to “monetize” their work. Donations will not feed a family.