[emx]

Interesting posts and a variety of opinions.

As someone who has been involved (albeit at a much lower $ value) in acquisition deals, I am not entirely sure this deal will benefit the Zimbra community.

Whatever the fancy announcements that are made, this deal is about money for the Zimbra owners. Who would refuse $350M wherever it came from? The talks about "we're joining the best team, we'll do great things, blah blah" is just that - talk. It'd be interesting to see how much of the senior management of Zimbra is still in place in a few months.

Personally I hope that the FOSS edition will be continued using the current Zimbra's model and forgive me for not believing 100% the Zimbra posts saying everything will stay the same. Try to name one acquisition where everything stayed the same.

Zimbra is built using a lot of Open Source technology and I think it is only fair that they provide an Open Source edition of their products. I hope Yahoo will see that as well. Many of us believe in the Open Source benefits - but do the top executives at Yahoo do? I really doubt that. At that level, everything is about market penetration, stock value and revenue streams.