Zimbra now Yahoos! thoughts

[kevindods]

Wonder if anyone at Yahoo (nee Zimbra) can confirm what forks would be possible with the Zimbra Code? Open Source does not equal Free (speech) software, can we take anything from the source that has been open and use it anywhere eles? The license was based on the Mozilla license and it was possible for Debian to convert the source for Firefox to IceWeasel and free the code. My reading of the Zimbra license is that this is not possible - can anyone with knowledge confirm that assertion?

As to the likely future, if you were a large hosting/marketing company with ageing mail systems and were at a competitive disadvantage - $350m dollars is a low cost way of reversing that disadvantage and removing a route for other future competition. They could just sit on the knowledge and the product and still readily justify the acquisition to the board.

The real drivers for a deal like this are the VCs not the employees or directors, CEOs etc. For young companies with significant high risk capital in them, even if they are doing well and have met targets, the VCs hold the company by the short n curlies.

There are no certainties in this life and it isn't/can't be known for certain whether this deal will be good or bad. In fact there probably isnt a simple good or bad, it is probably far too grey and indistinct an outcome to use such black and white terms.

The problem we have here as customers is we don't know the 'real' motives for the Yahoo! move. We felt we knew the Zimbra staff and management were geared to succeed with the software as they had personal commitment to success, demonstrated in the forums, development and support apart from the obvious monetary drives common to us all. They can now measure that success in terms of this deal and feel justified that they have produced a good product, so for them I am glad to say it must be a good deal.

From senior and middle positions I have had experience of a fair number of acquisitions, mergers, divestments etc and all the euphemisms applied to such activities. They often are not done for the sentiments publicly expressed, they are often not very successful, they are difficult to manage and from a corporate culture perspective often very stressful.

I hear the comments from staff and management and I understand that they themselves need to feel confident that their environments are not about to be made uncomfortable and no one wants to see Zimbra slide to obscurity or pervert to something far away from the original intentions.

The real problem is that you now have no control, ownership or influence other than that which you gain from understanding the real percieved value and motives of Yahoo! Zimbra is no longer what it was because you no longer have control of the code. All the talk and platitudes have no real currency when spoken from this point in the deal.

Perhaps even Yahoo! hasnt determined what to do yet. $350m is £175m and that is not really big money for Yahoo! It is good for the VCs who pumped in $30 (£15m) and the staff/management who had shares, they get some cash based financial compensation to comfort them if things go bad for them. Yahoo! could sit and let Zimbra run to v5 and then take time to consider where their best interest lie. So for 12-18months there is no need to change anything indeed changing anything significant for any acquisition would be a folly as it can take that long to get to understand it and prepare it for change.

What is sad from my perspective is that I settled for a product that appeared open but not free and I think the lesson here is that this type of hybrid license and product does not in itself provide the benefits most users imagined it would. Yes fast development, growing company but the core of open and free is the essential guarantor for the user and still seen as a 'problem' to some commercial authors.

I think I have learned that you have to really believe in Free as well as Open at the core or the thing risks becoming perverted when it rubs the old or traditional commercial world. All the other OSS collaboration servers have been/originated or became old style commercial software houses looking for a way forward. Unless there is a real FOSS attempt I think this scenario will keep repeating.

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by kevindods

Wonder if anyone at Yahoo (nee Zimbra) can confirm what forks would be possible with the Zimbra Code? Open Source does not equal Free (speech) software, can we take anything from the source that has been open and use it anywhere eles? The license was based on the Mozilla license and it was possible for Debian to convert the source for Firefox to IceWeasel and free the code. My reading of the Zimbra license is that this is not possible - can anyone with knowledge confirm that assertion?

First of all: Ignore the moderator badge above. I do not speak for Zimbra here. Nor do I have any inside information about this merger. I heard about the Yahoo! purchase the same time you did.

AFAIK, the Mozilla and the Zimbra license are similar (maybe even identical). I need to go double check. You can do significant modifications to the Zimbra code, but you will need to leave the powered by Zimbra logo up there. Think of it as GPL meets BSD's attribution clause.

The IceWeasel thing was due to Debian stupidity about IP restrictions. Debian wants full creative control over every application in their system. Mozilla wasn't about to let them do that, and still call it Firefox.

Originally Posted by kevindods

As to the likely future, if you were a large hosting/marketing company with ageing mail systems and were at a competitive disadvantage - $350m dollars is a low cost way of reversing that disadvantage and removing a route for other future competition. They could just sit on the knowledge and the product and still readily justify the acquisition to the board.

Everyone here is focusing on the end product. I almost wonder if what Yahoo is going after is the AJAX technology in Zimbra. There is a massive war starting between the various API vendors, and the Zimbra toolkit is a massive amount of fairly well tested code that is targeted at large applications, rather then one off web pages.

Originally Posted by kevindods

The real drivers for a deal like this are the VCs not the employees or directors, CEOs etc. For young companies with significant high risk capital in them, even if they are doing well and have met targets, the VCs hold the company by the short n curlies.

From my experience in the .COM era, Zimbra isn't a particularly high risk corporation, esp when compared to companies like Google, Yahoo, or the other fly by night AJAX companies. Don't believe me?Take a look at the terms of the deal, and look at who gets the cash. If Yahoo were stabler then Zimbra, don't you think the VC'ers would have asked for Yahoo stock instead of Yahoo cash?

Originally Posted by kevindods

There are no certainties in this life and it isn't/can't be known for certain whether this deal will be good or bad. In fact there probably isnt a simple good or bad, it is probably far too grey and indistinct an outcome to use such black and white terms.

That's true enough.

Originally Posted by kevindods

The problem we have here as customers is we don't know the 'real' motives for the Yahoo! move. We felt we knew the Zimbra staff and management were geared to succeed with the software as they had personal commitment to success, demonstrated in the forums, development and support apart from the obvious monetary drives common to us all. They can now measure that success in terms of this deal and feel justified that they have produced a good product, so for them I am glad to say it must be a good deal.

Given that the staff isn't changing, I am not worried about this.

Originally Posted by kevindods

Perhaps even Yahoo! hasnt determined what to do yet. $350m is £175m and that is not really big money for Yahoo! It is good for the VCs who pumped in $30 (£15m) and the staff/management who had shares, they get some cash based financial compensation to comfort them if things go bad for them. Yahoo! could sit and let Zimbra run to v5 and then take time to consider where their best interest lie. So for 12-18months there is no need to change anything indeed changing anything significant for any acquisition would be a folly as it can take that long to get to understand it and prepare it for change.

If Yahoo doesn't consider 350 million big money, the will be out of business before the end of the year. Esp since this is _cash_. Not stock, not options. What's even more interesting is that this is something that is outside of Yahoo's normal business niche. That's strongly indicative that they have thought this through. How many people at Yahoo have the authority to sign checks this big?

Originally Posted by kevindods

What is sad from my perspective is that I settled for a product that appeared open but not free and I think the lesson here is that this type of hybrid license and product does not in itself provide the benefits most users imagined it would. Yes fast development, growing company but the core of open and free is the essential guarantor for the user and still seen as a 'problem' to some commercial authors.

That's a big brush you are wielding. This is not particularly surprising train of thought - it's part of the reason that Stallman is so dismissive of Linux, Mozilla , Java and Gnome. For all of the FSF's outspoken vitriol on this issue, there is a reason everyone runs Linux instead of GNU herd, uses Java for programming, runs their desktop in Gnome, and views web pages served from Apache in Mozilla. Everyone one of those packages are or were commercially backed and form the foundation of the Microsoft alternatives today.

[awalker]

Originally Posted by p24t

Then again, we might see Zimbra go away. Not entirely, as Yahoo purchased a technology, and obviously wants to make use of it.

Can you say "MusicMatch"? I thought you could...

[jholder]

Originally Posted by awalker

Can you say "MusicMatch"? I thought you could...

Oh brother. Zimbra is a server mail software. The music division is different than the mail division. Has yahoo put MusicMatch into their web mail?

[awalker]

Originally Posted by jholder

Oh brother. Zimbra is a server mail software. The music division is different than the mail division. Has yahoo put MusicMatch into their web mail?

No, but they acquired what was a pretty decent MP3 ripper/tagger/player and within the space of a couple years killed it off in favor of the completely unusable Yahoo Music Jukebox.

The fear I (and apparently others) have is that Zimbra gets similarly "Yahooified" into unusable, bug-ridden junk.

[p24t]

Originally Posted by jholder

Oh brother. Zimbra is a server mail software. The music division is different than the mail division. Has yahoo put MusicMatch into their web mail?

RFE: streaming audio for Zimbra.

[atomic2k]

Hey,

i think thats a really great deal for the Venture Capital Investors of Zimbra (got 10 times of their investment back) but for the ordinary user/customer it is a major drawback. You can pretend neutrality a million times, but it is not in your hands anymore! Guys, you don't have to sell the whole company if you want to sell the product. And i cannot believe that any other hoster will take software which has been made by a competitor, i mean we are talking about a whole business area which has been abandoned and left to Open-Xchange as no other major player in oss collaboration is neutral and has the knowledge about this market. Also the SME inhouse market is not the main focus of Yahoo iirc.

[dijichi2]

OSS license and restrictions
Wonder if anyone at Yahoo (nee Zimbra) can confirm what forks would be possible with the Zimbra Code? Open Source does not equal Free (speech) software, can we take anything from the source that has been open and use it anywhere eles? The license was based on the Mozilla license and it was possible for Debian to convert the source for Firefox to IceWeasel and free the code. My reading of the Zimbra license is that this is not possible - can anyone with knowledge confirm that assertion?

As to the likely future [snip]

This is an extremely succinct summary from kevindods. It has asked the really important question for the opensource community: Is it possible to free the zimbra code, if what many people see as the inevitable occurs - zimbra is effectively killed off like with so many other corporate acquisitions.

I hope this is not the case, but it would be a dream come true for opensource if the code could be freed as with iceweasel (although I suspect this is not the case).

That's a big brush you are wielding. This is not particularly surprising train of thought - it's part of the reason that Stallman is so dismissive of Linux, Mozilla , Java and Gnome. For all of the FSF's outspoken vitriol on this issue, there is a reason everyone runs Linux instead of GNU herd, uses Java for programming, runs their desktop in Gnome, and views web pages served from Apache in Mozilla. Everyone one of those packages are or were commercially backed and form the foundation of the Microsoft alternatives today.

Without wanting to pick at arguments here, I respect what you are saying here but disagree, and agree with kevindods. Reason for Linux vx Hurd is technical not ideological, Java has been massively held back from its potential in the past purely due to its licensing, gnome was effectively started for ideological reasons against commercial interests (kde/qt licensing), Apache derives from academic roots (A Patchy NCSA server). People also tend to forget that most 'Linux', more accurately called GNU/Linux distribution, is actually RMS/FSF code.

I love the Zimbra product, and from a commercial customer point of view I love the way the product is sold/put together. From an opensource point of view however it's very far from ideal, and kevindod hits the nail on the head with his last paragraph.

[kevindods]

Thanks, that reply was useful and interesting. The license point especially as I understood the Debian 'need' for control over Firefox and also Mozilla for wanting to protect their investment. What I didn't know was that the Zimbra one was really the same, I thought there was additional provision for more control somewhere in there. Thanks for clearing that up.

If that is the case the license is freer than I thought and is not the type of hybrid I have seen with some other projects. I am happier with that. I think the Mozilla one is proven to be free enough for purpose and the redrawing of some of the issues with the Sun Java license show there is some general change to acknowledge the need for further freedom to keep the balance between creators, contributors and users fair.

Given that I wonder what really has motivated Yahoo! and what they think they have bought? I am not sure that hosted email nor related software licensing are out of the business model norm for Yahoo! I guess it must be the people and knowledge and perhaps to be the owner of the code for Comcast services? ;-) I suspect they know the reaction of current users would not be good and they themselves have done nothing that I have seen to quell any discomfort leaving that to Zimbra staff.

$350M in cash is an amount to notice but I suspect the cash wielding ability of Yahoo! is not much reduced. My main point there was more that it is quite quickly justified if you look at the range of advantage it could offer, ie not just direct commercial revenue. As to VC looking to stock in Yahoo! over good cash multiples I doubt it ;-)

As to staff, I hope that the 3 year lock-in is set to be a good experience, it could be great - but I would have expected a good personal deal to comfort me incase it wasnt. I hope they all got a good deal, sometimes these inequal unions of disparate desires can go mouldy. Having the potential legal threat of IP and anti-compete, whether enforceable or not, hanging over you in a place you no longer want to be is one where you want a good bank balance to rest on.

As to not changing the staff? The entire culture, ethos and direction could change anytime Yahoo! choose. They may well make it impossible for the current staff to make the difference they want to or continue doing what they think is right. Might be the same people, but they themselves may well have to change.

As to thinking it through, I suspect, as usual with such deals the initial driving force is only a part of the end result. As the union continues, skeletons, treasure and other occupants of dark corners on both sides can come to change the nature of the relationship. Even for us in a small old world country £175m (3-5x turnover) to buy a growing company with 3 yr lock-ins is not that great an amount. As to VC risk, setting a mail/collaboration software house up against MS and a plethora of also rans is a risk, irrespective of the company and product itself.

It was a good result for most of those involved in the deal. As customers we aren't sure and we are now as exposed as it is possible to be with such a product. We need to carefully review the exposure each of us has wrt the assumptions we made and initial conditions we found when we selected the Zimbra product. Right now I don't know how things will really go. But I am not alone in reconsidering my options and that could well be a factor Yahoo! expected or anticipated. If so, what are they going to do with that fact and how will they respond to it?

Time will tell, doom and gloom it isn't, but I like to keep a view on the weather and the potential for change. Hey, I live in England, its all we talk about ;-)

PS dijichi2 I agree - with the real origins of the likes of Gnome, Apache and Linux itself the core is that it should be open and free. Never that it shouldnt be commercial. To clarify the post about old commercial, I mean those that cling to closed and proprietory not just that they are commercial per se. I keep an eye on Citadel and Opengroupware and OpenXchange - at present Citadel is a little light weight still but showing more promise than before - at least it gives a free open source desktop with web and offline clients for shared calendar, contacts, tasks and email using Thunderbird and Kontact. Nowt for Outlook though, which doesn't surpise me! The others are still not really very well put together and have varying levels of free! Zimbra has developed, moved on and placed itself well, up until now.

[randall]

I have nothing against Yahoo!

The only worry I have for now, is normally in acquisitions like this, the buying company would at the start support the technology of the acquired company, continue it's development and later on, integrate in their major products or services, and then later on, killing the acquired technology.

Then BOOM!!!!!! Gone for all Zimbra lovers and users. Well, I HOPE NOT!

Let's just all keep our fingers cross that this is not another 3E in the making. (Embrace, Expand and Exterminate).. duh.....

But still, extending my KUDOS to the Zimbra team for making it's technology outstanding that it was able to get the attention of Yahoo!

Wishing you the best and goodluck!