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Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million
TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has acquired the open source office suite Zimbra for $350 Million in cash. Zimbra has been in and out of the news over the last couple of years for their office suite, and recently launched offline capabilities. "The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers."
Perhaps I've missed something but isn't Yahoo usually not too fond of open source stuff? Perhaps they're changing their ways? Or maybe they just want to make Zimbra proprietary to kill any open souce competition? I guess time will only tell on this one...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Last year I setup a dual box zimbra system to replace some rather high traffic imap servers that served ~1200 users with 550+ concurrent during periods of heavy load, with a *lot* of incoming and outgoing mail peppered full of attachments. I was pretty skeptical at first about how the system would hold up, but not only was it solid, in many ways it was much faster than the previous system, especially with the mailboxes that were huge in size.
Solid backups, good inegration with third party software, easy extension and a solid upgrade in place system makes for a great product. It didn't hurt that their techs were responsive and actually knew about all the software (much of it OSS) that their product was based on. I'm suprised that is Yahoo though, figured it would be Apple to turn into their enterprise mail platform.
--- I do not moderate.
I agree with you though, that Yahoo is not very friendly with Open Source. Look at their Launchcast music service...it's not friendly to Firefox even to-date!
Unfortunately, I cannot make a difference since I am no developer.
They really should have taken a look at zombo.com. There are many more possibilities there, according to the sources I've queried.
This is not yet another competitor for Microsoft Office or Open Office. (God knows we don't need any more!) Zimbra is a little more specialized, concentrating on email, scheduling, and other "collaboration" stuff.
I seem to recall trying Zimbra a little while back and not being terribly impressed. Yahoo seems to have a history of buying companies for the sake of products or services they would have been better off developing themselves. Anybody remember broadcast.com?
No need to fork Zimbra, we have a light weight alternative in Bongo (http://www.bongo-project.org/) that we'd love to have more people help out with.
As well as Bongo, there is also Citadel doing similar things, Kolab doing completely different things, and a couple of web-only groupware systems.
Zimbra's by no means the only game in town.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
I did not know this http://www.bongo-project.org/ existed. I swear to God...I have never heard of Bongo at all. One wonders what else I do not know about.
Zimbra is by far the best at what it does. It's better than every web based Groupware (is that the proper name?) software out there. Let's just hope Yahoo doesn't run it into the ground. I don't see why they'd actually want or need this software. Yahoo already has lot's of talented programmers and pretty decent software. The Zimbra code is probably useless to them and all of Zimbra's features and quality could be copied without owning them. It isn't like Google buying Youtube (i.e. buying established users) because Zimbra really only has a cult following. For how good it is, it really isn't that popular. This purchase really confuses me. Like I said, I hope they actually do something with Zimbra instead of buying it and letting it sit on the shelf.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
We're saving the noise and partying for 1.0 ;)
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
oooo, this could turn out bad. There has been a lot of talk of Microsoft buying Yahoo in an attempt to catch up to Google. And if MSFT does buy Yahoo, thereby acquiring Zimbra, it is another FOSS code base that we might lose time and effort on.
Of course, we don't want to speculate needlessly about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. This is exactly the wedge that we see Microsoft driving into the FOSS community with their deals with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. Undoubtedly, one of the benefits to Microsoft of the Yahoo acquisition talks is that many members of the FOSS community will shy away from Yahoo, simply because they might become a Microsoft property. And even people who like Microsoft and its products might hesitate to use Yahoo products and services if they see Yahoo stumbling.
So I would like to see Yahoo get its financial house in order. I am really fond of Google and its products and services, and I tend to use Google tools and properties more than the Yahoo counterparts. But I wouldn't want to have competition in this area reduced to only two major players: Microsoft and Google.
So come on, Yahoo, get your act together! And stop talking with Microsoft about acquisitions! Ick!
From the Zimbra press release:
Will the Zimbra server and Web client remain open source?
* Access to the Zimbra source code will remain available and free.
Will new Zimbra projects and additions to the current Zimbra suite be open source?
* Zimbra will continue its practice of offering both an open and certified, network editions of the software.
Vote Libertarian
I was curious too. Apparently after Novell chose to stop active (paid, full-time) development on it some people started a fork.
Quack, quack.