Universities Embrace Open Source Email
More than 100 colleges and universities now run Zimbra. Eager adopters, the company claims, include:
- Georgia Institute of Technology – United States
Earlier this year, The VAR Guy spent considerable time blogging about Zimbra’s open source email platform. He suspected that the collaboration suite would gain momentum with colleges. Boy was he right. In recent months, Zimbra deployments have more than doubled in higher education. For Exchange and Lotus Domino/Notes VARs serving higher education, it might be time to give Zimbra a look.
More than 100 colleges and universities now run Zimbra. Eager adopters, the company claims, include:
- Georgia Institute of Technology – United States
- University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee – United States
- La Sierra University – United States
- Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute – Australia
- Universiti Malaysia Perlis – Malaysia
Some of the deployments push beyond 50,000 in-boxes. In some cases, Zimbra has also given Apple Servers a lift in higher education.
Although there’s a free version of Zimbra, the company has also sold more than 6 million Zimbra licenses as of January 2007, up from 5 million paid licenses in 4Q 2006.
It’s the “although there’s a free version of Zimbra” piece that has a lot of open source people upset. Zimbra offers a free version because it’s the only way they could satisfy the open source licenses of the components to which they helped themselves — Cyrus IMAP, MySQL, whichever open source MTA they’re using, etc. But to do anything useful with Zimbra, you have to buy the non-free version. Zimbra is “fake free” software.
Organizations with a clue are looking into true open source groupware solutions like Citadel [http://www.citadel.org] which is a little less well-known because they don’t have Zimbra’s marketing budget, but the solution itself is just as good, and it’s true open source. There is no non-free “enterprise edition” — the Citadel team makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms (GNU GPL).
I disagree strongly with IG’s comment
‘But to do anything useful with Zimbra, you have to buy the non-free version’.
I have been involved with a number of installations and have only used the open-source version with users accessing the system via the superb web interface.
If anyone needs a desktop client I can install Thunderbird or the upcoming Zimbra desktop.
Zimbra is not truly “Open Source” (clearly not ISO-approved). Luckily, it’s likely to be built on Linux, which is Free (as in freedom) and open source too.
Oops, I meant OSI, not ISO. Typo/Freudian slip.
“Free (as in freedom) and open source too”
This is typical of most people. Open source is for all intensive purposes Free (as in freedom).. This does not mean it has to be free as in gratis. The would is run on money.. everything cannot be free.
Zimbra is as “open source” as most other company’s out there. they show there source code but maintain the rights to it so that there effort is not waisted for another competitors gain.
I fully support the open source way of development but people have to get over this free thing.
[…] past year, Zimbra has been on The VAR Guy#8217;s radar multiple times. Some service providers and universities have aggressively embraced Zimbra as a reliable, cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange in recent […]