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..
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