Thanks, that reply was useful and interesting. The license point especially as I understood the Debian 'need' for control over Firefox and also Mozilla for wanting to protect their investment. What I didn't know was that the Zimbra one was really the same, I thought there was additional provision for more control somewhere in there. Thanks for clearing that up.
If that is the case the license is freer than I thought and is not the type of hybrid I have seen with some other projects. I am happier with that. I think the Mozilla one is proven to be free enough for purpose and the redrawing of some of the issues with the Sun Java license show there is some general change to acknowledge the need for further freedom to keep the balance between creators, contributors and users fair.
Given that I wonder what really has motivated Yahoo! and what they think they have bought? I am not sure that hosted email nor related software licensing are out of the business model norm for Yahoo! I guess it must be the people and knowledge and perhaps to be the owner of the code for Comcast services? ;-) I suspect they know the reaction of current users would not be good and they themselves have done nothing that I have seen to quell any discomfort leaving that to Zimbra staff.
$350M in cash is an amount to notice but I suspect the cash wielding ability of Yahoo! is not much reduced. My main point there was more that it is quite quickly justified if you look at the range of advantage it could offer, ie not just direct commercial revenue. As to VC looking to stock in Yahoo! over good cash multiples I doubt it ;-)
As to staff, I hope that the 3 year lock-in is set to be a good experience, it could be great - but I would have expected a good personal deal to comfort me incase it wasnt. I hope they all got a good deal, sometimes these inequal unions of disparate desires can go mouldy. Having the potential legal threat of IP and anti-compete, whether enforceable or not, hanging over you in a place you no longer want to be is one where you want a good bank balance to rest on.
As to not changing the staff? The entire culture, ethos and direction could change anytime Yahoo! choose. They may well make it impossible for the current staff to make the difference they want to or continue doing what they think is right. Might be the same people, but they themselves may well have to change.
As to thinking it through, I suspect, as usual with such deals the initial driving force is only a part of the end result. As the union continues, skeletons, treasure and other occupants of dark corners on both sides can come to change the nature of the relationship. Even for us in a small old world country £175m (3-5x turnover) to buy a growing company with 3 yr lock-ins is not that great an amount. As to VC risk, setting a mail/collaboration software house up against MS and a plethora of also rans is a risk, irrespective of the company and product itself.
It was a good result for most of those involved in the deal. As customers we aren't sure and we are now as exposed as it is possible to be with such a product. We need to carefully review the exposure each of us has wrt the assumptions we made and initial conditions we found when we selected the Zimbra product. Right now I don't know how things will really go. But I am not alone in reconsidering my options and that could well be a factor Yahoo! expected or anticipated. If so, what are they going to do with that fact and how will they respond to it?
Time will tell, doom and gloom it isn't, but I like to keep a view on the weather and the potential for change. Hey, I live in England, its all we talk about ;-)
PS
dijichi2 I agree - with the real origins of the likes of Gnome, Apache and Linux itself the core is that it should be open and free. Never that it shouldnt be commercial. To clarify the post about old commercial, I mean those that cling to closed and proprietory not just that they are commercial per se. I keep an eye on Citadel and Opengroupware and OpenXchange - at present Citadel is a little light weight still but showing more promise than before - at least it gives a free open source desktop with web and offline clients for shared calendar, contacts, tasks and email using Thunderbird and Kontact. Nowt for Outlook though, which doesn't surpise me! The others are still not really very well put together and have varying levels of free! Zimbra has developed, moved on and placed itself well, up until now.