'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated' The closest model I'm familiar with to what they're doing is the FreeB

'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated' The closest model I'm familiar with to what they're doing is the FreeBSD Foundation, so this is more classic "pay us for OSS" than anything else. So I don't think this is a startup proposal. Unusual for HN I know, but given the plan I doubt they're tracking pirate metrics or blabbering about pivots. Which is sort of a pity because actually my problem isn't email (there is plenty of webmail I can deploy privately), my problem is group calendaring with multiple share/sync options (for which only Google Apps meets my requirements).