License change

[nrc]

Just wanted to thank Zimbra for the adjustment they've made to their licensing language. A lot of the panic over a potential acquisition of Yahoo! was based on the notion that a third party could buy Yahoo! and then arbitrarily terminate the open source license. This change seems to close a loophole that might have allowed that.

Announcement: License & 5.0.7 FOSS!

[webman]

Yes, I agree - thanks Zimbra team! I think this is really good positive news regarding the previously-contoversial license issue of the YPL.

This is also interesting - "...to minimize any confusion about whether it's better to use the version provided by Zimbra directly or via the Fedora distribution." Fedora distribtion? I wonder what goodies they have in store for us!

[bjquinn]

Yes, I agree - thanks Zimbra team! I think this is really good positive news regarding the previously-contoversial license issue of the YPL.

This is also interesting - "...to minimize any confusion about whether it's better to use the version provided by Zimbra directly or via the Fedora distribution." Fedora distribtion? I wonder what goodies they have in store for us!

I believe that's 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?

It seems to me that the two real issues are this :

1. Upon acquisition, whether Yahoo (read: Microsoft) could not prevent you from using the software you were already using, or possibly preventing future use of software you weren't using yet but that was previously released before the takeover.

2. Whether some other community could take over development if the Zimbra team were disbanded. (Or maybe the Zimbra team gets back together after the geniuses at MSFT let them go...)

Seems to me #1 would probably be taken care of by some nice anti-trust proceedings even if the license doesn't fully take care of it, but #2.... anyone?