Microsoft-Yahoo Is Dead, Long Live Zimbra
Now that Microsoft has ended its pursuit of Yahoo!, a lot of folks are analyzing the big picture at both companies. Yada, yada, yada. But instead of focusing on the forest, The VAR Guy would prefer to focus on one tiny tree: Zimbra, the open source email platform that Yahoo owns, can now breathe a little easier.
Alas, under Microsoft’s potential ownership, Zimbra would likely have suffocated and died. Plenty of Zimbra fans expressed their fears about Microsoft to The VAR Guy.
And for good reason. Zimbra is a wildly popular open source email platform. Plus, it’s cross-platform and it even has a loyal following within Mac OS X Server communities — particularly university IT departments.
Sure, Microsoft has come around a bit to open source. And the Microsoft-Novell alliance has won praise from selected enterprises that want to run Windows and Linux side by side.
But let’s be clear: Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (which Microsoft withdrew on May 3) targeted online advertising. Zimbra, which Yahoo acquired in September 2007, would have been chewed to pieces as Microsoft digested Yahoo.
So good luck Microsoft, as you seek alternative efforts to compete with Google. And good luck Yahoo, as you try to explain to investors how you let Microsoft walk away from the negotiating table. But most of all, good luck Zimbra. You escaped a terrible fate now that the Microsoft-Yahoo discussions appear done. Don’t squander this new lease on life.
Long Live Zimbra AND Yahoo
Zimbra is not under a open source license anymore. It is under the Yahoo Public License 1.1 which has proprietary restrictions. So who cares?
What are the restrictions? Is it compatible with any of the open source licenses?
Now that Microsoft has ended its pursuit of Yahoo!gt;gt;gt;
That’s wishful thinking, my dear!
I don’t see any proprietary restriction on the license. It is a simple mozilla like license (you most provide source for modified files but any added file is just yours).
I don’t think it is a problem if you want to GPLing your code.
adding to my own last post. The only problem may be this:
“3.2 – In any copy of the Software or in any Modification you create, You must retain and reproduce, any and all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are included in the Software in the same form as they appear in the Software. This includes the preservation of attribution notices in the form of trademarks or logos that exist within a user interface of the Software.”
I think you can’t convert it to GPL with this, and I’m not sure how will it work for doing something that is fully different than what it had before.
I’m not so sure that Zimbra is ever going to provide any real value to Yahoo, even without the threat of a Microsoft takeover looming. Zimbra has effectively painted itself into a corner when it comes to value in terms of cost/benefit. They helped themselves to FOSS underpinnings in order to develop their product quickly, and because of this they are obligated to offer a feature-crippled free version. Because of their well-funded PR department they were able to spin this as “see, we’re an open source company” in order to gain some street cred, but anyone who has taken a serious look at Zimbra knows that if you want it to be useful to anything more than the most simplistic of installations, you have to buy the “Network Edition.” This effectively locks them out of the marketplace for true open source solutions such as Citadel and Kolab and eGroupware because they’re not true end-to-end FOSS. At the same time, they can’t raise their prices high enough to make real money with the product, because customers would just as soon go with Exchange. Disclaimer: I’m a Citadel developer, and a proponent of end-to-end FOSS solutions rather than weird commercial hybrids such as Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter). But I think there’s a lot of weight to what I’m saying here.
Zimbra is not really open source. Its more like semi-open. Its absolutely useless IMHO. Its essentially proprietary software, with an crippled “open source” demo. In order order to get the “full version” you need to pay for a per seat/per year license.
http://alexvalentine.org/?p=576
Alex, there is a community (Open Source) version that is free to download and use. I’ve installed it and it works well, without restrictions:
http://www.zimbra.com/community/
The Network Edition (which has the 60-day trial you are talking about) has more benefits, if they are important to you:
http://www.zimbra.com/products/network_edition_benefits.html
Exchange when you talk about about features being crippled, your pretty much describing Exchange. The system manager is a cluster, and a joke. Administrating it is not rocket science, but for the cost, it’s pretty pathetic. While Exchange 2003 came out I didn’t see much improvement, what they gave us OWA, whoopy! You want to talk about crippled, that would be OWA. Zimbra’s Ajax client I found much more useful, and they even had a built in mobile friendly client that I use instead rather than syncing over the air. ALL which included in the open-source version. While I will agree that the Open Source version isn’t open source… it’s just… well free, it does NOT lack features. It’s pretty much the full blown thing minus MAPI, Mobile Sync, Branding (you can’t do that with exchange) and various borderline useless features like doing searches within attachments. Zimbra’s strength is on the Administrator side, I absolutely love managing it, where I have lost my faith in it though is the fact that you cannot attach contacts to tasks, calenders, etc. This was the breaking point for me. If Exchange wants to kill the competition all they need to do is make system manager better (I don’t mean user friendly, just less of a cluster of crap), come up with a nice Ajax client or something to that effect, because OWA sucks, and give us some other mobile options, over the air sync shouldn’t be your only option. Other than that all of Exchange’s best feature functionality is within Outlook, not exchange. Also another thing about Zimbra, where all the cool zimlets?!?! They have NOTHING in the way of Zimlets, it’s a joke.