Hello all, I want to provide a brief overview regarding various questions surrounding features that are being removed from Dovecot CE going forward.
We are currently working on providing updated/improved website info and documentation that will better explain exactly what is being maintained in CE. However, the desire to have unified messaging clashes with the Engineering Team's desire to continue to push code to the open source repository when it is ready... So I want to educate on just a few points here, with the promise that further information will be provided in the future. A reminder that Dovecot is commercial software, and has been since Timo made this decision 13 years ago. Dovecot is not maintained by a community of volunteers. We continue to be lucky that Timo remains Dovecot's Chief Architect today, but there are 20 dedicated Dovecot employees, plus additional Open-Xchange support staff, that are working on the software everyday. This is carrier-grade software, which requires significant resources to maintain. Dovecot CE is the open source version of this commercial product (currently, Dovecot Pro). Dovecot CE is not a separate project - it is maintained as part of the day-to-day maintenance of Pro. Every single person that works for Dovecot/OX is extremely proud and dedicated to releasing as much software as we can to open source. CE is able to take advantage of this situation to provide features that would not be allowed in a purely voluntary project (for example, there are 5 full time QA people working on what is eventually released as Dovecot CE). However, there remains a delicate balance of what we can openly release and what we need to be able to commercially provide in order to keep the lights on (which allows us to continue to provide open releases...). This is a difficult juggling act, and is one that is always prone to recalibration in any open software product, not just Dovecot. Dovecot CE has always been 100% open source, and will continue to be so. Nothing is changing in the future. Dovecot CE has been, and will always continue to be, fully compliant with open source principles (see https://opensource.org/osd/). For a variety of software, maintenance, and (yes) business reasons, there comes a time when decisions need to be made to move beyond existing software. This is completely normal in software development, and there is no "open source" duty to continue to maintain software that is no longer useful (or, is broken or is unmaintained or is not longer best practices or is no longer commercially viable or is duplicative of other features that exist or ....) That decision is what is being done for a selection of longstanding Dovecot features. It is time to move on from them. There are valid reasons to do so. If you disagree: the software is open source. You can continue to use the existing software, adapt it to your needs, move to a different solution, or whatever else. To focus development efforts, and to provide extreme clarity for users going forward, Dovecot CE for the first time has adopted a defined Vision Statement: "To provide the world's premier open source, standards compliant, full-featured, single node email backend server." This vision formulation was made to ensure that CE users continue to receive world class, stable, tested, modern, secure email software going forward. Maintaining features that have existed since the mid-2000s (replication, Directors), at the expense of moving the software forward to adapt to new paradigms (cloud, containers, storage-layer replication, statelessness) is not the proper choice. These Dovecot CE feature decisions are mine. If you are unhappy with them, I ask that you direct your vitriol directly (and privately) to me. The Dovecot Team does fantastic work and has provided software, under open source principles, that runs millions of email servers around the world. They continue to provide invaluable feedback internally in determining the proper balance between open and commercial considerations. They deserve to be thanked by the community, not vilified. michael _______________________________________________ dovecot mailing list -- dovecot@dovecot.org To unsubscribe send an email to dovecot-le...@dovecot.org
