When Yahoo acquired Zimbra in September 2007, some Zimbra backers worried Yahoo would mismanage the open source email asset. Fast forward to the present, and some Zimbra proponents have gone from concern to outright panic over Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (and, by attachment, Zimbra).
The VAR Guy is calling for calm, but Zimbra email fans 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 management.
Zimbra has quietly managed to compete with Microsoft Exchange Server in several markets, particularly higher education. In fact, Zimbra is very popular as an email server running on Apple hardware in the university sector.
Yahoo acquired Zimbra last September as part of the search company’s deeper push into Web 2.0 applications, software as a service and open source.
It’s far too early for Yahoo to say how Zimbra will potentially evolve under Microsoft management. After all, the Microsoft-Yahoo mating dance has only just begun.
Zimbra fans certainly are worried about their trusted email platform. But perhaps that’s a good thing. The louder customers shout — as we learned during the Oracle-PeopleSoft merger dance — the more apt vendors are to bow to user demands.
Microsoft, take note.
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Let’s face it, Microsoft is not expecting any revenue from the Zimbra group out of Yahoo. They offered to by Yahoo at last year’s average stock price to take out another competitor before Google does.
Zimbra, PostPath, Scalix are collaboration softwares that run on Linux. It does not make any sense to maintain or improve a product that will put a dent in their lucrative Windows server business.
You should read about what they did to RAV anti-virus for Linux after they bought it in 2003.
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). They cannot fork it.
This is real folks. We are looking at a state wide deployment and we have been testing over the last several months now. The ZPL now the (YPL) does not allow forking it seems. I doesn’t even seem as if the developers could fork it if they chose because the logo is trademarked and therefore the property of Yahoo and presumably Microsoft if this goes through. And the trademarked Logo *cannot* be removed from *any* of the pages in the web client per the license. We are very concerned.
First they buddied up with Novell and killed Hulu, now Zimbra is next.
Microsoft did not kill Hula at Novell. That product was dead long before Microsoft got in the picture.
When the Zimbra acquisition was announced by Yahoo!, that was the death blow. Now Microsoft will shut it down completely or allow it to limp along while the Microsoft team attempts to push the Zimbra install base onto Exchange.
I appreciate the VAR guy believing that Zimbra customers can make a loud noise, but the billions that Exchange generates is too deafening of a sound for anyone to shout over.
Start looking for an alternative.
[…] Yahoo became public news the Zimbra forums and the web generally has been busy with the sound of Zimbra customers showing genuine concern and a lot of cautionary angst over the future of Zimbra in a Microsoft “owned” empire […]
Well, anyone, dump Zimbra, get Zarafa. (www.zarafa.com)
Zarafa? For why? The licensing for it is unclear, so how would it prevent the same thing happening again?
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Forking? Seems allowed.
# 3.2 - In any copy of the Software or in any Modification you create, You must retain and reproduce, any and all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are included in the Software in the same form as they appear in the Software. This includes the preservation of attribution notices in the form of trademarks or logos that exist within a user interface of the Software.
# 3.3 - This license does not grant You rights to use any party’s name, logo, or trademarks, except solely as necessary to comply with Section 3.2.
It would have been GPL, it would have not suffered this
premature death, another example of-how bazar kills the
technology!
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