grapes-general — Anything goes

[James Ascroft-L. <jw...@de...>]

To all future developers for the grapes project,

This mailing list is for general discussions loosely connected to the
subject matter of the grapes SourceForge project.

                              About Grapes
                              ------------

Traditionally, the "last-mile" Internet connection provider to private
households has also offered mail relaying, mailbox hosting and web
hosting to their customers. As with most things, though, this is no
longer a stable situation. Providers like AOL are in a position to
differentiate themselves from their competition by offering better such
facilities along with their "last-mile" connections. This includes
instant messaging with video conferencing and higher storage capacities
on their web hosting. They are also in a position to deliver custom
software that makes these facilities easier to use, both on their
servers and on their clients' machines. Desiring some of this market,
other companies like MSN and Google are offering alternative services
that aren't bound to your "last-mile" provider and have also
demonstrated their desire and ability to deliver proprietary software
solutions to their servers and clients.

This project has the goal of levelling the playing field. The primary
goal is to provide Free Software alternatives to enable smaller
companies and non-profit organisations to provide similar levels of
service to these giants (albeit for a smaller number of people). It
should also be straightforward to provide these services for yourself,
your family and your employees. A secondary goal is to make it easier to
migrate between service providers so that people don't feel tied down by
having, for example, given their @proprietary.webmail.provider.example
email address to all of their contacts. A tertiary goal is to develop a
brand so that people will be more inclined to use a provider who
advertises themselves as "powered by grapes" i.e. to promote the use of
this project.