I think there are some very long bows being drawn here, model t fords and windows 98 are not good examples to be using with regards to support and EoL.
Yes everything has a use by date and gets EoL, it's the timing of it however that makes it critical. RHEL4 is still very very much a production platform in use by a great number of people and guess what it still will be next year and the year after that.
While I accept that Zimbra only have the resources to build, test, and support ZCS on a finite number of platforms, the selection of those platforms should be carefully considered and linked to who is paying your bills. If your resourses are so thin you shouldn't be axing support of dominant in use platforms for new ones and should mirror the life cycle's of your distro partners, ie 7 years for RHEL4.
Just because there is a new version of the distro doesn't automatically mean you go out and upgrade to it for the hell of it, not broke don't fix it springs to mind.
You'd do well to remember in the enterprise world RHEL has at about 50% market share and most of that is RHEL4. Their biggest worry btw comes from Sun and Suse, not a Ubuntu as it's not even in the same market space, most people using it are NOT in the production business. Seems to me your business model is focusing too much on FOSS and not enough on the paying side of the ledger.
Should we be worried that the ZiHoo model is now FOSS with adverts plastered though out like normal Yahoo media tart crap?
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If we don't build Zimbra for this version of OS, is that keeping people away from our product?
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Absolutely it will, and it will give you invalid stats to a degree. Example I use Solaris or Debian for every other box I have, but because 2 years ago when I wanted ZCO I had to choose a platform you supported so I've been using CentOS every since for it and our testing machines. People that don't have the ability to leverage other distro's may well just walk to a competitor instead over looking ZCO.
To say the community can just build from source so therefore it's not the deathbed of say OpenSUSE thats being either extremely naive or insulting, without Zimbra to drive it nothing will really get done and it will be ever more a niche userbase, ie look at the solaris builds there aren't alot of us using it or compiling.
Face facts part of the appeal and major selling points for Zimbra is it's ease of installation and upgrade (hello MacOSX users), your targetted market is not the hordes of unix boffins that feel comfortable with g++ etc. If I was Tgx I'd be dirty too as OpenSuse is every bit as popular with the masses as Ubuntu, and the OSX version can't be that stellar on take up either in comparision, unless you've hit that market hard.
I'd like to see Zimbra as a company engage far better with it's paying customer base about what they want. Ie out of the box AD support, extending Zimbra into document management and support tracking via 3rd party relationships at a company level, make life easier for your clients to achieve things that help them reduce costs thereby driving the ZCO ROI up. Everyone I talk to locally agree's these things are a no brainer.