I'm less concerned about Yahoo 'killing Zimbra' as I just dont see it happening, but I am curious about what exactly Yahoo has purchased.
I mean, the Zimbra suite consists of numerous GPL'd apps that cannot be 'bought' so Yahoo cannot call them their own. The bulk of Zimbra is open sourced, so Yahoo's competitors can go and grab the whole thing and have a look at it, eliminating much of the competetive edge Yahoo may gain from the acquisition.
The main thing Yahoo get from this is the tech behind the Network Edition, which is not opensourced and not GPL'd so Yahoo now own all the NE code and can do what they want with it.
It's because of this that I dont see a problem for the OSS version of Zimbra, but rather see tight intergration of the NE with services offered by Yahoo.
Yahoo are unlikely to alienate the entire existing NE customer base by making the NE version unusable though, so is it unreasonable to think that the product will just remain the way it has been? |