Zimbra now Yahoo! thoughts

[easytouch]

The direction of which technology will be 'integrated' into the other is clear:

"Zimbra offers incredible technology. We see great opportunities to incorporate some of their best-of-breed features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products."
Zimbra is so damn cool - Yodel Anecdotal

"into" Yahoo products.

Congratulations Zimbra Team.

Congratulations Yahoo for the good timing, and that you get more out of the deal than Zimbra. You gain not only the technology, but a competitor out of the business at the very best moment where the number of licensed users rised quickly and customers of Zimbra where getting bigger and bigger.

[Cringer]

I must admit, this deal makes me very worried.

I hope (and pray) that certain zimlets (yahoo) don't get turned on permanently.

I hope that all my hard work of convincing my company to go away from Exchange, isn't all wasted.

I hope that the software doesn't start to bloat.


And on a lighter note, will we ever see the Gmail skin finished?

[greenrenault]

Contrary to what seems to be a common 'this is bad' vibe going through this thread.

Our team think this is fantastic and look forward to seeing what this new partnership brings to the Zimbra product. We proudly announced this to all the Zimbra customers we currently support.

And to those that believe Yahoo! does not 'contribute much' to the open source community - please remember that Yahoo currently employees Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP. And much of Yahoo Mail runs on PHP. Listen to The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

Congrats Zimbra! And welcome Yahoo!

[phoenix]

Kirme3 raised an interesting question. Let's imagine that in a near future (1-2 years) people would like to see Instant Messenging bundled with Zimbra, like Zimbra also acting as an Instant Messenging server.
In the normal opensource thinking, there would have been no hesitation, and the protocol chosen would have been Jabber. But I can barely imagine yahoo using jabber for one of their product, as they already have... a wonderful proprietary IM protocol.

Instant Messaging is already bundled with Zimbra and will be released in Version 5 due in November.

[jholder]

All-
We're still reading up on your thoughts and concerns.

We hear ya, please keep an eye on the blog.
http://www.zimbra.com/blog

-john

[emx]

Interesting posts and a variety of opinions.

As someone who has been involved (albeit at a much lower $ value) in acquisition deals, I am not entirely sure this deal will benefit the Zimbra community.

Whatever the fancy announcements that are made, this deal is about money for the Zimbra owners. Who would refuse $350M wherever it came from? The talks about "we're joining the best team, we'll do great things, blah blah" is just that - talk. It'd be interesting to see how much of the senior management of Zimbra is still in place in a few months.

Personally I hope that the FOSS edition will be continued using the current Zimbra's model and forgive me for not believing 100% the Zimbra posts saying everything will stay the same. Try to name one acquisition where everything stayed the same.

Zimbra is built using a lot of Open Source technology and I think it is only fair that they provide an Open Source edition of their products. I hope Yahoo will see that as well. Many of us believe in the Open Source benefits - but do the top executives at Yahoo do? I really doubt that. At that level, everything is about market penetration, stock value and revenue streams.

[dijichi2]

Personally I'm surprised Zimbra was sold at such an early stage, the prospects are fantastic and I'm sure it will be worth a ton more in the future.

I share others concerns that Zimbra will remain an autonomous product like it currently is, rather than being subsumed into just another yahoo hosted service.

My initial thought/hope/wish would be that Yahoo would actually opensource Zimbra (not the NE just the 'opensource' edition) properly under a half decent license, and start to build a development community around it.

[jeepville]

I hope this doesnt push back the release of the outlook connector for 2007 and vista. So that they can cram yahoo stuff in the release instead.

Overall I agree this seems bad. Kinda looks like a pirate move take what you want and scuttle the rest. Its sad now days but its easier to buy code then it is to write it. As a paying customer I hope this doesnt phase itself out in a year or so it is going to stink to migrate to something else we love our current zimbra server.

Good Luck Zimbra.

[phoenix]

I hope this doesnt push back the release of the outlook connector for 2007 and vista. So that they can cram yahoo stuff in the release instead.

I understand your concerns but how many times does it need saying? The schedule for the release of Zimbra 5 is still as stated in the Product Roadmap with the feature set and fixes outlined there. Nothing has changed and nothing is being 'crammed in'.

[Dirk]

Generally speaking, people dont like change. That's the essence here. It's not right or wrong to fear the unknown, it just 'is'.

The OSS version will always be just that, and if it starts to include ads and other functionality that people may not want, the license permits you to edit the source, recompile and bingo, problem gone. That said, I dont see that ever happening.

The acquisition will have been under discussion for a long time, and I've seen no slowdown in development of the product recently, so I dont see the whole suite being moved into closed source as a result of this deal.

This purchase shakes a lot of peoples 'comfort zones' and that's ok, but theres no reason to believe that is the end of the world. I too was shocked and a little worried when I read the news, but at the end of the day, the only outcome will be a better product so it should all be good.