Last week we have finished the talks to transfer ownership of the SabreDAV project to fruux.

I’ve been working at fruux as a lead-dev for some time now, and SabreDAV is really at the core of everything we do, so this was a logical and inevitable choice.

To me it’s an important step. SabreDAV has been one of the very little things that have remained consistent in my life. This validates my work from the last 6 years a bit. In another way it feels a bit like I’m letting go something that’s very important and personal.

However, I’ll still be running the project so in reality the change for me personally is not that big :).

What’s SabreDAV?

SabreDAV is an open-source project that I’ve started all the way 2007. It allows you to write WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV servers in PHP. These three technologies allow you to do file, calendar and addressbook syncing.

A few years ago steam really picked up, and it changed from the hobby project that it was back then, to something I could actually make a living off by doing consulting.

In 2012 I’ve took it one step further, and teamed up with fruux to build a commercial product around SabreDAV.

What will change?

Small stuff really. The GitHub urls have changed. The new project pages are:

• https://github.com/fruux/sabre-dav
• https://github.com/fruux/sabre-vobject
• https://github.com/fruux/sabre-xml

A bigger change is that fruux will now be the official go-to place for commercial support. I feel this will strengthen the SabreDAV project, especially for the potential users that are into that sort of thing.

It also means that getting a new website is in the cards :). The current one has passed it’s expiry date.

Does this mean SabreDAV will go closed-source?

No. I would never let this happen. SabreDAV will remain as open source as it has always been, and we also don’t intend on making it crippleware.

The BSD license in place today is very liberal, and I feel that it’s exactly this that has allowed many projects and businesses to adopt it. Taking that away would not only damage the project, it would also feel ethically wrong.

However, SabreDAV is primarily a library, suitable for integration into other systems. We’re definitely looking into the possibility of offering a more complete package, such as a standalone server with solid management interfaces.

Thanks!

Thanks everyone for your continued support, pull requests and relying on SabreDAV for your projects :). It’s the best reward, really.

If you’re interested, also check out the announcement on the fruux blog