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A. Chain mail traditionally refers to those useless emails that say if you don't forward it, something bad will happen. Here, every recipient is almost certainly someone who will benefit if Microsoft is not permitted to buy Yahoo.
B. Being timid, or adhering strictly to etiquette, will not save Zimbra. There won't be a second chance to get serious later. The general public needs to get involved.
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Hi Rusty
I understand your point of thinking, and greatly respect your passion about this issue. However, whether they will benefit or not, the vast majority of people who would read what you were advocating won't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about, and spamming will only serve to blacken the name of Zimbra and be ultimately counterproductive.
Unfortunately at this time getting the general public involved in a grassroots rebellion will accomplish little - at this point of a public hostile takeover I would have thought Yahoo has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders not to throw it's assets out of the aeroplane door, so to speak. Doing something as major as opensourcing Zimbra would require board approval, and given that it is a small but very strategically important piece to Microsoft I just can't see this happening, not unless it is done to deliberately offrail the takeover and there would be shareholder revolt should this be done and legal consequences.
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In a business like this, it's money that talks, not the opinion of a bunch of open-source users like you and me. If Warren Buffett wants to buy Zimbra and make it open source, he can offer enough $$$ to do so. But an online petition, even if it has thousands of signatures, won't accomplish the job. Basically, what costs nothing is worth just about that much when it comes to influencing a business decision.
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Generally I agree with this, but I strongly disagree with the last sentence. The value of an internet/community/opensource product, which Zimbra partially claims to be, is to various degrees tied to the strength of it's online community and users. In particular with Zimbra, as there is so much overlap with the community and commercial products and clientbase, shouting very loudly that paying customers will jump ship if Microsoft takes over, which costs nothing to do, would in most situations be a very powerful disuading argument.
Unfortunately, in this case, the predator company will almost certainly have no interest in this vocal outburst when they likely just want to kill the product.
Lots of people - including me - were outraged and very pessimistic for the future of Zimbra when Microsoft came onto the scene - it made the sale to Yahoo for such a small sum look like a disastrous decision. For sure the future still looks uncertain but I have a feeling that one way or another, Zimbra will come out the other end even stronger. I think that either regulatory issues or the Zimbra team will ensure that Zimbra lives on in one form or another. I still pay for my commercial licenses, and I am still working on contributing to the community source code.