Zimbra now Yahoos! thoughts

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

Hi gmsmith

Great to hear positive note from a hosting partner. There has been lots of speculation and generally not very happy response to the purchase from the evil overlords, however its all gone a bit quiet now, hopefully everyone is reflecting and holding their breath hoping things will go OK. Personally I'm feeling much happier about the OS prospects than I was when the sale was announced, although the rather sudden and unannounced license/sourceforge change didnt help matters. I'm not great with licenses but as you say it does seem to just simplify stuff and not add any more conditions. Conspiracy theorists would wonder why the need for a change however, especially as the network edition stays the same (for now).

I know the Zimbra guys are great guys, and they're gonna be sick of hearing this, but a simple statement from Yahoo would put all these fears and speculation to rest. Why haven't they?

Ignore the moderator badge above. This is my opinion only.

I looked through the license, and from a layperson's point of view it looked fine. Simply a attribution and give it back clauses. Googling for the license didn't reveal anything (no hits for the license name) which makes me a bit more scared then the MPL derived license (which is Open Source certified), but I don't have anything concrete to base that on. The text looks okay.

My guess is that the Yahoo lawyers got involved, and this is something Yahoo already was mooting. Yahoo to this point has mostly released their code under the BSD license, something that would never work for Zimbra's business model.

[bigmudcake]

One thing that always impressed me about the Zimbra people was how open they are to the community and communicate all that is happening with their products.

This no longer appears the case.

My biggest concern is that release 4.5.8 still has no official announcement or blog post. But a yet to be released product (Zimbra 5 RC1) was happily announced.

Why the non announcement ???

Does this mean we can no longer rely on the Announcements forum and blog to keep us informed on whats happening to zimbra ????

What was the urgency in changing the License and the need to release a whole new version just to incorporate it ????

Do we need to upgrade our 4.5.7 installations just for the sake of a license change (which "appears" to be the same as the previous license) ?????

This does not feel like "business as usual" to me ????

[bigmudcake]

A big thankyou for the "announcement" posts regarding the release of 4.5.8

*UPDATED*ZCS 4.5.8 Open Source Edition


It has cleared up alot of concern and confusion.

[Rich Graves]

The PC World article (see linkbacks below) is inane. That we'd hear skepticism from dozens (out of dozens of thousands) of forum users doesn't surprise me. One interesting point that hadn't occurred to me before: Brad Garlinghouse's bit about how Yahoo is *not* just a consumer business. Their domain registrar, Yahoo Store, etc. target pretty much the same sort of customer that Zimbra has been targeting. Many of those customers are probably interested in SaaS, but others are going to want on-premises software. The acquisition makes a lot more sense to me (from Yahoo's POV). The use of the Yahoo AJAX toolkit in the new (and much improved) "Standard HTML" client no doubt put relevant engineers in contact with each other, and given Comcast's relationship with Yahoo (co-advertising, etc), that's another tie-in.

[webavant]

I went to an OSS conference at Yahoo! in April and listened to a lecture by Rasmus Lerdorf and many other leading figureheads in the OSS movement. I can't imagine why some developers are giving them such a bad rap with keeping Zimbra open source and not to mention their abundance of other free software and open source libraries like YUI web tools.

[easytouch]

I just wanted to share a link with you:

Interview with Satish after the Acquisition (mp3 download and transcript)
Read/WriteTalk » Blog Archive » Satish Dharmaraj - CEO Zimbra (Acquired by Yahoo)

[gettyless]

I'm not familiar with the total history of how Big Corporate Tech Entities deal with their acquisitions, but here is a data point:
Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as they call it) » Crowdstorm (the blog)

The Yahoo/Kelko deal with about 3.5 years ago, enough time for -
* the founders to leave
* original crew to breakup
* a stronger focus on the bottom line, quarterly numbers and all that good stuff

Those 3 things seem to be a common (inevitable?) occurrence for these situations. Then again, Zimbra is not Kelko, it's:
* in a different time period and investment atmosphere
* a different product
* in the Bay Area
* possibly a better fit in the grand scheme of things according to the of the Yahoo Corporate Strategy wizards who are thinking 6 steps ahead of everyone else

So maybe I should have no reason to confidently say "give it 3 years for Big Corporate Parent to erode away The Acquisition's innovation and culture" - but give it 3 years to enhance innovation and culture.

Bah - who says in 3 years I'll be working at a place that wants me to admin Zimbra, but it's always fun to try to predict.

[raj]

hi..there were 126 replies on this thread 1 hour back..last 10-15 replies all gone now

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by raj

hi..there were 126 replies on this thread 1 hour back..last 10-15 replies all gone now

7+ threads on the MS topic - the merged location is here
John, Mods, & I merged them because they were filling all the recent/top thread locations with the topic, which keeps other people from getting the development or support help they need - that's the goal of these forums after all
(If you hit a link to a moved thread it will redirect you to the big one.)