from my previous experiences of when such offerings were done, they most often have ended to the same way in other words this is a buy out attempt to kill this project in fear of its possible competition. often they would offer positions and such but that is only for the transer period that at most would last 2 years and very often such transition consultancy runs for 3 to 6 months after which they would give you the pink slip..
i would be carefull with this..
On 7/26/06, Thomas Bruederli roundcube@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everybody,
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.
Don't panic, I didn't decide anything yet and I don't want to get rich anyway :-)
Regards, Thomas
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ben Duncan Date: 25.07.2006 09:06 Subject: Roundcube merger - Ideas from atmail To: roundcube@gmail.com
Hello Thomas,
Ben Duncan here, I emailed you earlier this year about doing some consulting work for @Mail in Australia but it seemed you were busy.
Just as a quick intro, I'm the founder of @Mail, a WebMail/Email-server project I first started in 1998. We are based in Australia and run a business with about 6 people, supporting the @Mail product as our main focus. Our site is at: http://atmail.com/
We'd like to propose a business deal to merge Roundcube with our @Mail product. In summary we'd like to fork an open-source version of @Mail, and use the current Roundcube product as leverage for the open-source offering. We would then continue developing @Mail as the full commercial copy with added features; while running a decent quality open-source version as incentive for people to use our commercial copy.
We can offer you a reasonable fee to purchase the license of Roundcube, the site, and for the effort you have contributed to the project. We'd also be very interested if you could spear-head the development of our open-source @Mail product that would be merged into Roundcube and offered to the open-source community.
If you are available we'd love you to consult our company in Australia for 1-3 months on the development of @Mail and merging the two products for the open source offering. We could propose a deal for the merger and pay you for consulting our company for the desired time you'd like to visit Australia.
Let me know if you are open to any business deals, and I can submit a proposal for you.
Kind regards,
Ben Duncan