Yahoo layoffs.

[Bill Brock]

With a thousand going, how many Zimbra employees included. This is sure to affect the quality of Zimbra. Probably one reason Open SuSE support is being canned.

[jholder]

Bill,
Your posts are always fun to read.

Thought I'd give you some facts to help out. I've been with Zimbra as part of the core team pretty much since the beginning, so I'm a pretty reliable source.

1) Zimbra is making more money than ever. We're HIRING, not laying people off! See Careers as development engineers, software engineers, sales representatives at Zimbra Look at all of those! APPLY, PLEASE!

2) Since Zimbra is turning a profit, Yahoo! values the Zimbra team

3) OpenSuSE is NOT getting canned because of that, and such speculation is really in bad form. There just isn't much interest in it. We track download and install numbers for when people notify us. Suse has only been installed 41 times since the beginning of the year. Compare this with RHEL which is well over 1k or Mac which is a little less. (See screenshot of reporting console)


4) ALL of the engineers are committed to Zimbra, and are Zimbra's most important asset. We're not only a team, but we're friends. That's what made us successful to begin with, and that's what makes us successful now. I hope you will believe me when I say Yahoo! knows that. That's why they paid 350 Mil for us, making Zimbra one of the largest acquisitions in 2007.

5) No one comes in to work and reads about Microsoft, or Google, or anyone else. That's someone elses' job. We have work to do, and that's what we care about. We have bugs to fix.

[uxbod]

Compare this with RHEL which is well over 1k

What proportion does CentOS hold then John ?

[jholder]

[quote ]What proportion does CentOS hold then John ?[ /quote]
a lot

[Bill Brock]

Had someone explained the reason for Open SuSE's drop instead brushing over it perhaps I would not have needed to speculate. What is bad form is not providing Open SuSE users with the facts.

I appreciate someone finally letting me know why it was being dropped.

Plus I'm glad my posts amuse you.

Plus I'm glad Zimbra is doing so well.

[SGIA]

Don't know if this is the correct place to ask, but is support continuing for Suse ver 10 Enterprise server?

Thanks

[mmorse]

We will continue to have SLES builds for both FOSS & NE in 6.0

[Rich Graves]

SUSE ES 10 32-bit and 64-bit are supported for 5.0.10, and I haven't seen any suggestion that they'll be dropped in the future. Like Fedora, OpenSuSE will not be supported for NE. I was surprised when it was (temporarily) added.

[Solaris]

You realise that the reason you only have 41 installs listed is because notification generally seems not to work in your installer? I myself have done over 10 installs of Zimbra on openSuSE 10.2 and 10.3 in the last 6 months. None of them were able to notify Zimbra of the installation. It always failed. A colleague of mine had the same problem. I'm sure there are lots of installs out there, you just don't know about them because your notification system is broken.

Have a look here also:
Zimbra dropping OpenSuSE support - openSUSE Forums

Lots of people mourning the loss.

[tgx]

Back to the original topic...

Bill, I don't see it as an issue. Yahoo! is trying to move beyond search with other software offerings, probably a good idea considering that MS will likely acquire their search business anyway. It has been stated in other posts that the core Zimbra team was not going to be affected and while their staffing levels could have affected their recent decision to stop supporting OpenSuSE, it has been more of a question that the download numbers didn't warrant the workload. Now I do find it interesting, if true, that the notifier was not working in all of the SuSE installations. That might explain a great deal.

FWIW, I've decided to move on to CentOS5. It is an rpm based distro which I am more familiar with than .deb, and 5.0.9 was released for RHEL which gives me the ability to test my migration without having to pull double duty of upgrading to a newer version just to port over to Ubuntu. CentOS, using GNOME, gives you a comparable experience I think to OpenSuSE. The fit and finish is nice and the updater seems to work as you might expect. If you decide to test, don't bother with CentOS + KDE, it's a mess.