The point of this grant is not to help software. The point is to help a service gain market shares and displace at least a little Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, and

The point of this grant is not to help software. The point is to help a service gain market shares and displace at least a little Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, and limit the inpact of having only US companies in that field. Email is a bit overlooked, but it's huge source of information, easy to obtain (with the appropriate laws), and quite good in term of quality. It renders email strategic. With a grant to an oss project, it's not achieving directly this goal. And the bettering of the oss ecosystem is not likely to help an alternative service hugely. Lastly, a mail server is probably one of the most annoying common piece of infrastructure to deploy. To the point that even people knowing how don't even bother.