[langs]

"it's about corporate accountability"

I would rather trust myself when it comes to accountability then blindly put my faith in a vendor. The only OS I have support agreements for is Solaris and that's only cause it is built into the licensing of some of the product we use.

Prior to Zimbra all our linux boxes have been debian because thats where I come from and have never seen a need to change that. Whilst Redhat has come along way I still have nightmares about fixing someone elses RH4.2 installation and the dependency hell it put you through. When we decided to use Zimbra for mail I opted to use CentOS as a middle ground, I see no reason to pay for RHEL and the last two years of perfect uptime with centos has proven it is not required.

To be honest when I was doing the proof of concept work for Zimbra if it hadn't worked with Centos cleanly we would not be using Zimbra today, but Sun One Messaging server on Solaris.

"Would you run your multi-[bm]illion company email system off opensource Zimbra, with just the forums for support if it goes tits up one day and you've got hundreds of people shouting at you to get it running? Would that be responsible?"

No I wouldn't not because I must have vendor support, but because internally our department doesn't have the history with it to take care of it. Also there was more value to buying zimbra then just the support like added features such as the mobile connectivity and the outlook connector. In truth it is often faster and better to look for help on the forums then contact support, it might just be our time zone differences but I have found I get a response faster on the forums then if I logged it. If I log it, it is never responded to in the same busniess day for us, it's not till 8-9pm that night that I get a responce from the support portal.

That said I know an awful lot of universities etc using sendmail or qmail et al with out any vendor support for it.