Yahoo selling Zimbra news?

[SPF]

Whether this is true or not...what a horrible piece of "journalism". Dozens of news outlets jumped in and ran this story - all based on some idiot woman who said "...According to numerous sources...blah blah blah". Who are these sources? Didn't there use to be libel laws? I guess you can claim anything you want now, as long as you cite unnamed sources who may or may not actually exist.

[goo0h]

As a friend points out, the journalist who wrote that BoomTown piece is married to a Google executive. Something fishy going on???

[EnriqueI]

Originally Posted by gracedman

I wish RedHat would take a look. So far, I am really impressed with them; they seem to really walk the walk rather than just talk the talk when it comes to open source.

I've had better experience with Novell. I prefer SUSE over RHEL, and their support seems better. Granted they are more in bed with M$... but I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing.

[crosscutrat]

Just speculation, but who in the industry boasts unified messaging, collaboration, and doesn't really have it available out of the box by definition... Broadsoft. Think about it, they already have a great commercial product based on many open source platforms. Their business model appears to be focused on on-site deployments and professional services to the same XSP audience that Zimbra does. As long as they continued the current direction of Zimbra, I would very much welcome a Broadsoft engagement.

[Mark Daniel]

Actually, I think Apple would be a good fit. They already have a server OS that is built, just as Zimbra is, with open source components (samba, openldap, postfix, courier, spamassassin, wsftp, apache, etc.). The email server that is currently built into OS X Server is, well, un-Apple-ish. It's barebones, and they could benefit from having a system that is more polished, like Zimbra. As long as they pledge to maintain it's platform compatibility and offer it as a separate product (and continue to participate in its open source community, as they do with WebKit/Samba/etc.), I think they'd be a decent fit.

[zigzap]

Maybe the user community could just buy it back? ... I know dreaming.... Still this is a great product and I hate to see it on the chopping block! Yahoo is fail at everything it touches.

[tgx]

Novell will never buy Zimbra, they have a competing product called Groupwise.
Apple won't because they are focused on the consumer market. It would kill Zimbra anyway, nobody is going to buy an Xserve to run Zimbra, and Apple isn't going to support it outside their proprietary OS, it only makes sense to Apple if it somehow drives their hardware sales.

RedHat or even Canonical are more logical partners. What Canonical should do is buy it and then make it an open platform for the world like they are claiming to do with their Linux distro. RedHat isn't a bad choice, but beyond that there isn't anyone else I would want to steward it.

[jonallport]

Canonical gets my vote!

The Zimbra Community/NE model would fit well with Ubuntu's FOSS/paid support model.

My offer's still open though. I'll need a few weeks to come up with the money; with it being Christmas etc.

[gracedman]

Hello, all. While the subject has come up, I'd like to get your feedback comparing Ubuntu and RedHat. I know it's pushing the definition of this forum but this is the etc section! It's important to me because we are ready to lauch a new business which will hopefully provide thousands or tens of thousands of Linux desktops and we are in the final process of deciding between Ubunut and Fedora (and possible Debian).

Since I don't want to hijack this thread, I'll open another in this forum. Thanks - John

[stiller]

Originally Posted by tgx

Apple won't because they are focused on the consumer market. It would kill Zimbra anyway, nobody is going to buy an Xserve to run Zimbra, and Apple isn't going to support it outside their proprietary OS, it only makes sense to Apple if it somehow drives their hardware sales.

Apple is also interested in the SMB market, see their mac mini bundled with Snow Leopard Server. Also, their current e-mail offering does not play well with the iPhone (!) See: iPhone and Snow Leopard Server's failure to communicate

However, I still don't believe Apple would be interested, as they only buy core technologies and/or engineering teams. They would not want to support and develop a product based on an existing java codebase. And lastly, I think a mac bundled with zimbra would cut into the mobileme market.