Comments on: Will Open Source World Welcome Microsoft-Yahoo Combo?

By: Microsoft’s Yahoo Takeover… Are Zimbra’s Days Numbered? | InfTek Hosting

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:35:17 +0000

[...] worry the email platform will suffer harm – or even death – at the hands of Microsoft. A series of blog reader comments posted on TheVARguy.com earlier today express fear, uncertainty and doubt about Zimbra’s future under potential Microsoft [...]

By: Will

Will — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:56:30 +0000

Here is something we all can do. This website is trying to get the word out.
http://www.freezimbranow.org/
There is also an online petition at : http://www.PetitionOnline.com/zimbra01/petition.html
Please go here to support zimbra and protect it from Microsoft

By: Andydread

Andydread — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:24:21 +0000

Cannot fork it. The ZPL and now the YPL prevents that. This is not true open-source. This badgeware. SugarCRM suffered from this problem also but now the are GPL3 so their customers are safe in this scenario. I don’t even think the Zimbra people can fork it even if they wanted to because the logo (which you must leave on *every page*) is trademarked and now MS will own this trademark. It seems they may have shot themselves in the foot with this badgeware license. Badgeware does not protect the customer from buyouts it seems.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:28:21 +0000

Zimbra. What would be really interesting would be to see a fork of Zimbra compete against the proprietary development model

By: db

db — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:23:58 +0000

The Zimbra mess shows the importance of the license open source is developed under. What did the developer think when they read the Yahoo! Public License (YPL). Maybe they did not read it, do you think?

By: JayDee

JayDee — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:33:26 +0000

Zimbra falling under the control of Microsoft is a VERY VERY bad thing. (Zimbra falling under the control of Yahoo is a bad thing too)

However if this does happen and Microsoft kills Zimbra perhaps the Opensource Community will start to work more on the Bongo project. (Formerly Hula Project.) http://bongo-project.org That *could* be a replacement for Zimbra and it’s freely open source.

By: Andydread

Andydread — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:01:22 +0000

This may be very very bad for Zimbra. Zimbra is a successful MS Exchange replacement and I cannot see any reason for Microsoft to keep this train running. I fear this is the end of the line for Zimbra. I hope I am wrong. I truly hope I am wrong.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:05:37 +0000

The main things that concern me are Zimbra which would probably be shut down and a shining example of a LAMP variant (yes its BSD but I think LAMP now refers to the general idea or combination) being lost. I’m wondering if MS would over time move the Yahoo operations onto a .Net platform and begin spewing performance gain talk whether there was one or not.

By: joe

joe — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:58:31 +0000

#3 dB: Fair point on BAMP vs. LAMP. I will get The VAR Guy to apologize. #4 John Z: Nice analogy with Time Warner-AOL.

By: John Zbesko

John Zbesko — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:24:34 +0000

Dinosaurs mating (merging.) Evolution (open source and Google) has past them by. This merger will be as successful as Time Warner and AOL. The wasted investment of MSN can be buried in Yahoo.

Microsoft refuses to see the end of the large-scale proprietary software business model while the rest of the industry turns to a service/consulting business model.

Google remains the top search site because it is the top search site. Until a distributed search engine is developed and adopted by hundreds of thousands (similar to peer-to-peer file sharing), Google will remain on top. And the motivation for a peer-to-peer search engine will be the freedom from (or lack of) the commercial aspects (ads, collection of user data, etc.) that Google must continue to develop to satisfy its shareholders.

By: db

db — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:23:09 +0000

I thought that Yahoo used BAMP (BSD, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) not LAMP.

By: Nickd

Nickd — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:22:39 +0000

Personally, I see this as the end of my yahoo mail account also. I will begin to use my gmail account more often and besides, the gmail interface is so much faster than the latest yahoo beta mail interface.