Okay, I've read the e-mail a few times and I think I understand what's going on here. @mail realizes that no matter what they'll always have to compete with RC, so what they want to do, in essence, is put an @mail t-shirt on RC, so that wherever RC goes it will be advertising their competing product. And they want to pay Thomas to allow them to put that t-shirt on, and to integrate some of their feature into roundcube (or vice-versa - doesnt' really matter since they'll be the same thing)
This is all up-side it seems to me. Thomas get's some money, and free trips to Australia. RC get's renamed (who cares?) and get's some new features.
If @mail would be willing to pay you to rename and rebrand RC and the website, and then have their engineers submit patches to you the same as anyone else, I think that would be great. On the other hand if you're going to rebrand RC for cash, you might as well offer the same deal to @mail's competitors and see if you can get a better deal!
If @mail wants to take control of the source and community with the purpose of choking and killing it, then as has been suggested, roundcube will simply pop back up with a new name.
In conclusion, don't be afraid to make a buck off of all the hard work you've done, but get a lawyer and consider the real possibility of a set-back in the project if @mail doesn't work in good faith.
-Charles
Paul Waring wrote:
On 26/07/06, Thomas Bruederli roundcube@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Their home page reads:
"Filtering out the white noise of growing open-source options, @Mail is a reliable and complete messaging platform that includes full source code for complete control."
Doesn't sound as if they're terribly keen on open source to me...
Anyway, if they want the advantages/features of Roundcube, they can take them, provided they abide by the terms of the GPL. I don't see why they'd have to license the name or buy the domain if they just want to improve and open source their existing product. There's also nothing to stop them offering commercial support for Roundcube if they want, as far as I'm aware that's perfectly legitimate under the GPL.
Paul