Comments on: Universities Embrace Open Source Email

By: TechIQ » Archive » Losing An Open Source Friend

TechIQ » Archive » Losing An Open Source Friend — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:49:59 +0000

[...] past year, Zimbra has been on The VAR Guy’s radar multiple times. Some service providers and universities have aggressively embraced Zimbra as a reliable, cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange in recent [...]

By: Anti

Anti — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:12:22 +0000

"Free (as in freedom) and open source too"

This is typical of most people. Open source is for all intensive purposes Free (as in freedom).. This does not mean it has to be free as in gratis. The would is run on money.. everything cannot be free.

Zimbra is as "open source" as most other company's out there. they show there source code but maintain the rights to it so that there effort is not waisted for another competitors gain.

I fully support the open source way of development but people have to get over this free thing.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:16:47 +0000

Oops, I meant OSI, not ISO. Typo/Freudian slip.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:16:11 +0000

Zimbra is not truly “Open Source” (clearly not ISO-approved). Luckily, it’s likely to be built on Linux, which is Free (as in freedom) and open source too.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:15:03 +0000

I disagree strongly with IG's comment 'But to do anything useful with Zimbra, you have to buy the non-free version'.

I have been involved with a number of installations and have only used the open-source version with users accessing the system via the superb web interface.

If anyone needs a desktop client I can install Thunderbird or the upcoming Zimbra desktop.

By: ig

ig — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:27:24 +0000

It’s the “although there’s a free version of Zimbra” piece that has a lot of open source people upset. Zimbra offers a free version because it’s the only way they could satisfy the open source licenses of the components to which they helped themselves — Cyrus IMAP, MySQL, whichever open source MTA they’re using, etc. But to do anything useful with Zimbra, you have to buy the non-free version. Zimbra is “fake free” software.

Organizations with a clue are looking into true open source groupware solutions like Citadel [http://www.citadel.org] which is a little less well-known because they don’t have Zimbra’s marketing budget, but the solution itself is just as good, and it’s true open source. There is no non-free “enterprise edition” — the Citadel team makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms (GNU GPL).