Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
They really should have taken a look at zombo.com. There are many more possibilities there, according to the sources I've queried.
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
It is still the poster child for FreeBSD. They started on FreeBSD and kept using it to this date.
They are offering free open source SDKs etc on http://developer.yahoo.com/
They certainly have a problem in PR department if a slashdot user thinks Yahoo is not fond of open source.
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.