Quote:
Originally Posted by bjquinn  I believe that license change is undeniably good news! At the absolute minimum it shows that Yahoo is at least attempting to be considerate of the open source community.
Anyone care to help with the interpretation a bit? Does this change solve all our concerns or am I missing the mark altogether and it's completely unrelated? |
Well, given my usual double-disclaimer that I am neither a lawyer nor a Zimbra employee, I think it does one thing well: There has been a fear that if Microsoft (or somebody else) were to acquire Zimbra, they could unilaterally determine that all Zimbra users were in breach of the license "in their sole discretion," and just decree we all had to stop using the software. Without debating whether that fear was well-founded, the license change now says simply "if you breach the agreement," which leaves the definition of "breach" to lawyers and courts--which is better than the definition being Microsoft or Yahoo or anybody else deciding you're in breach because they don't like you any more. SO, I believe the license change increases the probability that everyone can continue to use existing software after a takeover regardless of the next steps of the acquiring entity.
I
DON'T think that it makes the prospect of a post-acquisition software fork any easier, because the attribution requirements are unchanged.