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These rumours about ms buying Zimbra are very scary. There is NO way that ms would support software for Ubuntu, Solaris or other Windows concurrents. There is NO way that ms would continue support for Zimbra.
There is no way a company forks Zimbra under the current license.
We are a paying customer, for 8 months now. We are very scared of having done the mistake of our lives, as we are just 80% complete in our migration.
The only way to have Zimbra continue to live is to have ZImbra GPLed.
Something will have to be done. We too migrated to Zimbra from Exchange. I did the migration a year and a half ago. So far everyone in the company is pleased and we will NOT go back to exchange. This is going to turn into a huge legal issue for Yahoo. There are a lot of paying customers for zimbra, and to have it bought up by Microsoft can only mean one thing for zimbra users.
This would be a huge fck up. I don't know what Zimbra people can do, I suppose not much. Yahoo could maybe GPL it to save technology, but I doubt it will happen. If this happens, it will have to be forked, maybe even by same team, starting with version 4.5x, which is, at least on the server side, MPL licensed.
Timing is intriguing. I think Semel was always for a good working relationship with MS but a non supporter of a buyout. With Yahoo profits sliding, redundancies and other difficulties I suspect it will be a tempting offer. Zimbra would not survive that for long. MS have a long history of buy to kill.
I do really hope this isn't a case of told you so....
Actually that news freaked me out too, Microsoft would not want to compete with its own technology on a lot of different aspects, not only Zimbra. From IT standpoint between Yahoo! support for Zimbra, Freebsd PHP and all others .... this is not a good move .....
You can't help but think that this has negative tones for people thinking about investing in Zimbra. Even using the open source edition it would be a substantial undertaking/investment for our company to move from Exchange. It may be open source but that wouldn't stop MS pulling the plug if it wanted to. I would expect the small print to say that Zimbra couldn't be "transferred" elsewhere. After some considerable testing I was about to recommend Zimbra to the management but now I'm not so sure. I think this needs some sort of Statement from the management of Yahoo, Zimbra or whoever detailing the position.
MS do want to compete against Google so that's a pretty good reason to keep it.
Last edited by Mike Scholes : 02-01-2008 at 07:26 AM.
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