Cyrus development will not be affected by this. While CMU has been running Cyrus, and employing one of the key developers, FastMail has a team dedicated to supporting the biggest open source project that we use. We have a new developer starting on Wednesday next week as well as Ken from CMU who has agreed to keep working on Cyrus as a FastMail employee and representing the project at conferences.
We are committed to improving the project and keeping it open. As a member of the Cyrus IMAP board, I'm very proud of the 3.0 release that we recently made, and we're currently planning for the 3.1 release which will include further significant improvements.
That's great news. We've been considering migrating to Cyrus instead of Dovecot in Virtualmin default installs, as Cyrus seems much closer to JMAP support and we're planning a rebuild of our webmail to use JMAP.
I often worry about infrastructure projects like IMAP, SMTP, DNS, SSH, OpenSSL, etc. They often have very small teams, mostly volunteers, and the implications of a bug, particularly a security bug, can be catastrophic. And, if something we rely on were to be abandoned, we'd probably be screwed; even in cases where we have the technical ability in-house to maintain another major project, we don't have the time (or the budget to add more people to our small team).
This worry is why we try to keep in-house expertise for our key tools. That's what got me hacking on Cyrus about 8 years ago to fix some problems we had - and look at us now!
I was concerned about what it might mean for Kolab, so I'm glad to hear you're keeping it alive.
Though admittedly I'm inclined to move the customer I have using it to Office365 hosted Exchange since they recently decided (against advice) that it was Very Important that their users start using Outlook which has meant a shift to local PST files.
Yeah, Outlook is happier speaking its native protocol than IMAP unfortunately, and we haven't had much luck getting Microsoft to engage on JMAP, so I expect we'll still have two ecosystems even if JMAP takes off - just the open ecosystem will be more competitive.
We are committed to improving the project and keeping it open. As a member of the Cyrus IMAP board, I'm very proud of the 3.0 release that we recently made, and we're currently planning for the 3.1 release which will include further significant improvements.