Surely there are large numbers of DoD employees and Federal employees generally who are illegally sharing too. The Federal government's networks are famous for a lack of policing. It will be interesting to see what happens when the RIAA goes after millions of attorneys who are paid to be a lot more ruthless than the RIAA.
It might be rather harder for the RIAA to get sympathetic legislation passed if they make a habit of that kind of thing.
A lot of that is how you deal with it - diplomatically saying "performance is poor on a system with 1GB RAM" is rather different to saying "this is a pile of crap".
Unless they're not even able to file factual bug reports on their own internal bug tracking systems, I have trouble seeing how this is the issue.
Having said that, a culture which practically makes it a disciplinary offence for a tester to file a bug report on the bug tracking system might explain rather a lot about the quality of some of Microsoft's products.
The main reason why it's hard to justify specialised hardware in PCs is that 9 times out of 10, CPU progress means that even if it isn't now, the CPU will be easily fast enough to handle 99% of end-user requirements long before they've made the return on investment on putting the extra hardware on the motherboard.
in fact it's perfectly legal for them to send bounty hunters over here, grab who they want, and ship them back to the US for tort.. err, sorry.. humane treatment. (Source).
No. It isn't perfectly legal at all. It's still kidnapping under UK law which applies because they're committing the crime on UK soil.
What they mean is "the USA backs these renditions and so will not comply with requests to extradite people who have been involved in carrying them out". Provided they can get themselves and their target out of the country before they get caught, they're free and clear. (This, of course, is easy enough - no doubt a plane would be ready and waiting at the nearest military airbase).
It's the warm fuzzy factor you need to account for.
You can provide a server room with a massive SAN backed up with the most fantastic support contract, redundancy at every step of the way and access times that desktop PCs can only dream of - but people seem to like knowing that the facility to use a drive that's physically sat on their desk exists.
Granted, any significant downtime of the SAN would affect a lot of people. But if you've already got a SAN you'd be using it as the backend infrastructure for a lot of business systems anyway, so significant downtime of the SAN would still affect a lot of people if they did have desktop PCs.
all you're talking about is replacing system drives that are so cheap they're practically free. How ?
SATA and PATA drives are so cheap they're practically free.
SAS and SCSI are substantially less cheap. Not staggeringly oh-my-god-I-will-have-to-sell-my-granny expensive, you understand. Probably about 3 - 5x the cost per gigabyte. That's before you consider that you'll want to RAID them, which adds more to the cost per gigabyte.
Fibre Channel is dearer still.
And if you start looking at proprietary interfaces like IBM's SSA (which is basically SCSI commands over a serial cable, but it predates SAS by several years and isn't compatible with it) you're looking at serious cash per drive. And with SSA, you need to put the drives into proprietary frames which only IBM make.
I can well believe that buying a SAN with enough disk capacity for the whole lot would work out a similar price to throwing a few dozen SSA drives and a new frame into the mix.
But Microsoft have a reputation for not only encouraging their developers to run the latest and greatest version, but also giving them the best hardware with which to do it.
I wonder how many developers actually had easy access to a laptop with less than 1GB of RAM to run Vista on, let alone tried it.
Provided you happen to be an accountant who works in a movie studio.
Has anyone ever figured out the arithmetic to find out how much profit a given studio is making on the assumption that the takings they quote to people who should be getting X% of the total are accurate? I am pretty sure it would demonstrate a massive loss year-on-year.
We could spend all day here coming up with measures and counter-measures.
I would point out that an invisible proxy will still be used regardless of what proxy the customer themselves uses - but then the customer could use a proxy over a secure channel such as HTTPS.
I have known ISPs bar HTTPS web proxies (generally when they're providing a filtered service to organisations like schools) - but then you're in a constant arms race to list every secure proxy out there.
Assuming the RIAA (or whatever the Danish equivalent is) decides to push the issue further, sooner or later the ISP is going to have to stand up in court and say "Look, we've done all we can, we're haemorraging customers and it is plain impossible to make a block any more effective. If you order us to do so, the only way we can comply with such an order is to shut down. And if you do that, then it follows you'll have to do the same for every other ISP in Denmark."
Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS (their main strength) for mobile phones rather than making phones
Ha!
Seriously, use an iPhone (or an iPod touch, the UI's more or less the same) for 20 minutes and then tell me MS can design an OS which is of good use on a phone.
(Before anyone berates me for using an Apple product as an example, remember that most of the market buys something that they can use without wishing a slow painful death on the designers. Not something that offers every bell and whistle imaginable and makes 90% of them unusable).
Seriously, does no one advise upper management that trying to block something on the internet just draws *more* attention to it? Happens over and over.
Wouldn't do much good if you did. The court ordered it, so it must be done.
Any halfway-competent ISP could null-route the appropriate IP address(es) easily enough. If feeling really clever, they could even whip up a script which would automatically do an nslookup of www.thepiratebay.com and null route based on the results of that - meaning that the pirate bay switching ISPs would achieve absolutely nothing.
Combine this with a transparent HTTP and DNS proxy doing something similar, and it'd be very hard for the great majority of users to get to the pirate bay.
But they're a business. They're in it to make money, not lose customers. Makes far more sense to implement just enough so that if they find themselves back in court, they can explain that they have done all that they reasonably can, but the Internet is explicitly designed to deal with things being made inaccessible and this aspect can't be changed.
If a pharmaceutical company comes up with a cure for (say) AIDS, should they be forced to give it out to the rest of the world for free?
Erm... I interviewed with a pharmaceutical company some years ago and in the course of my research I discovered that they had invented a number of medicines which were on some sort of a list held by the World Health Organisation of "drugs which are so important to public health all over the world that international law states that they must be made available universally at a reasonable cost".
I didn't research this any further, but I'd expect any half-decent cure for AIDS to find itself on that list so quickly the pharmaceutical company would be saying "damn! wish we'd spent the money on trying to cure baldness!" quicker than you can say "retrovirus".
Seriously, there is not some nefarious conspiracy amoung all corporations to screw linux users. Corporations just want money, and this plan only makes money for the RIAA. Banks (for example) have far more money and lobbying power than the RIAA and are used to lobbying about regulation.
I never said there was. All I said was that the technology makes it possible, and in a very tightly secured corporate environment maybe even desirable - but I added that I didn't see it happening to home users any time soon.
But for the PC in my home I'm the party with the keys, not a third part, so no problem.
Have you missed the controversy regarding TCPA?
TCPA provides a mechanism for a system to cryptographically authenticate itself as having particular software/hardware.
It is therefore possible to devise a network which won't allow a system to connect unless it authenticates itself as having hardware/software on some "approved" list.
The technology isn't (yet) commonplace enough for that to have happened. But how do you feel about your bank saying "Users must use Windows (version) or later to connect to our website" and actually being able to enforce it such an extent that no amount of user-agent spoofing will help?
The nightmare scenario being espoused is that eventually so many systems will enforce this that the hobbyist market will be crippled - because nobody will even be able to connect to their ISP with hobbyist-developed software.
Myself, I don't see it coming to that. I think it's more likely to stop at institutions requiring a very high level of security being able to guarantee beyond any shadow of a doubt that the only computers plugged into their network are authorised, that authorised systems can be guaranteed to hold a specific software image and that authorised systems are effectively immune to viruses. But I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA try and push for it to be extended to home user's PCs - either through deals with ISPs or through legislation.
FWIW, I agree with you - TCPA has the potential to allow real policy enforcement in a business environment and eliminate a lot of spyware/virus problems - which can in theory be reduced already with Windows policies, but let's face it, there's almost always a way around those.
But it's a double-edged sword. While there's nothing wrong with a third party deciding how the PC on your desk works in a business environment, I don't think you'll find many/.'ers lining up to agree to a similar system in a PC in their home.
My understanding is that defects are caused by imperfections in the wafer itself. The smaller process allows you to squeeze more chips onto the wafer but doesn't have any impact on the imperfections.
Then, no one will buy a new CPU. Intel and AMD aren't stupid. they know the consumer will run if they add this crap to thier products.
I hate to break it to you, but Intel think they've solved that problem.
They're starting to integrate the TCPA technology with something which business users will find genuinely useful and are likely to enable - vPro.
In brief, it's a mechanism to remotely manage PCs from a BIOS level upwards. But when you enable it (it's disabled by default), the TCPA functionality is enabled as well.
It doesn't take a great leap to see an OS which, on seeing TCPA functionality, uses it and cannot easily be persuaded not to use it. Right now, it's not available on everything - the cheapest PCs don't tend to support it. But that's filtering down rapidly, and all it requires after that is some bought legislation and/or technology licensing terms which state "where available, DRM functionality must be used".
14 years is just about as ridiculous as what the RIAA is proposing, the only difference is that it hurts people on the other side. Say what you will about riding a single work for a lifetime, but if someone's buying what you spent time to make, I'm sure you'd want a chunk of it, too.
What you're effectively saying is that anyone who produces any sort of intellectual property which becomes sufficiently popular should receive an exception to the rule of thumb which says "keep some of your money aside and put it into a pension scheme" which applies to practically everyone else in the developed world.
Why? The original purpose of copyright was to enable creative people to make a living from just doing the creative stuff - not necessarily riches untold for them and three generations succeeding them.
While 90% of end users will probably benefit from a simplified recovery process, it's a pain for the other 10% for a number of reasons:
The recovery disk can't be used to boot the PC into a recovery mode to try and rescue any data.
The recovery disk will almost certainly blow away anything else that's on the system - potentially including other partitions containing other OS installations. Whereas a straight Windows install can be instructed not to do this. Pretty vital if you need to restore data.
If the OEM provides a recovery disk, chances are the only way to get hold of a genuine, plain Windows install CD which eliminates the first two problems is to go out and buy a retail copy of Windows. Which is pretty galling when you look at the invoice for the PC and see that you've already bought Windows, you should have no need to buy it again.
If you get this far and decide to buy a retail copy of Windows - ok, you've accepted that, so be it. But - ah - the PC is two or three years old and can't possibly run Vista.
The bloatware on the recovery disk can make supporting PCs harder. Case in point: most wireless network cards have software which replaces the Windows user interface for wireless networking. Which means that now you can't easily talk your friend through setting up wireless networking over the phone because you have no idea what they can see.
The bloatware provides a false sense of security - "I don't need AV because I've got Symantec that came with my PC" (but I didn't read the small print and it hasn't updated in 11 months).
Even when the addon software is justifiable, it is frequently of pretty appalling quality. (HP, I'm looking at you and the backup application you ship with new PCs. Specifically, the application which takes backups perfectly happily but you can't easily restore from them. It's just as well I tested that before I handed the PC over to my mother).
Evolution in very simple terms means "the members of the species who have the most babies are the ones who continue it". Logic would appear to suggest that in most cases, the members of the species best suited to their environment are the ones who have the most babies.
If intelligence isn't necessary in order for one monkey to reproduce a bit more than his rather dumb cousin, then it won't have much impact on which one makes the most baby monkeys.
So yes, evolution does have a hand in encouraging people to have sex. It is only human intelligence and compassion which acts as a brake to that.
There was also a "Morning After" treatment that showed promise for preventing infection after likely exposure to HIV. It was an 8 week course of drugs similar to chemotherapy but, if completed, had a significant success at preventing infection.
Bear in mind that this post is based on living with nurses who claimed to know these things, and I really haven't got time to find hard evidence elsewhere. Take it with as much salt as you think it needs.
Not only did it show promise, it's available - at least in the UK. But only to members of certain professions who have been exposed accidentally, eg. by a drug addict walking into hospital and stabbing the first doctor they see with a needle.
I'm also given to understand that HIV isn't particularly infectious a few months after the initial infection anyway. This, however, isn't something that's broadcast terribly loudly because the medical profession doesn't really want to encourage HIV-positive people to start having regular unprotected sex. (I can think of a few other things which would give rise to such an approach - "not particularly infectious != 100% not infectious", and "we've not seen it happen yet, but this is a virus and viruses mutate very quickly").
That's a hell of a guess, and there are at least three problems I forsee with it.
Assumption 1: that the developers are sufficiently motivated to continue Zimbra development that no amount of money Microsoft is prepared to give them will change this. Remember Zimbra is a potential competitor to Exchange, a major cash cow for Microsoft, so if they feel threatened, it's reasonable to assume MS will be prepared to spend quite a bit to get rid of that threat.
Assumption 2: That there exist no non-compete agreements that could affect Zimbra developers. A non-compete with Yahoo would probably be fine because Zimbra doesn't compete against any of Yahoo's other products. This isn't the case with MS.
Assumption 3: That Zimbra's licensing (which I believe is MPL with an attribution clause) doesn't put another company off. I forsee a slight problem with that - namely, I'm not sure who will want to develop a product to tout as an Exchange killer while at the same time attributing credit to Microsoft. Even if they do, how will Microsoft's lawyers feel about someone else to advertising their product as "Fred's Exchange-Alternative Groupware Platform (powered by Zimbra, a Microsoft product)".
The joy of OSS is that if Microsoft/Yahoo discontinue support of Zimbra, someone else can pick it up. If there's a paid "corporate" version, I'm sure a company picking up would include support to migrate. I know that isn't ideal, but it isn't a reason for mass panic either.
To be fair, I don't know much about Zimbra, but many opensource projects (including some reasonably big ones) are only really well understood at a code level by a relatively small team of people.
If most or all of those people are employed by Yahoo, then even if someone else does pick up the Zimbra project this is a major setback.
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Surely there are large numbers of DoD employees and Federal employees generally who are illegally sharing too. The Federal government's networks are famous for a lack of policing. It will be interesting to see what happens when the RIAA goes after millions of attorneys who are paid to be a lot more ruthless than the RIAA.
It might be rather harder for the RIAA to get sympathetic legislation passed if they make a habit of that kind of thing.
A lot of that is how you deal with it - diplomatically saying "performance is poor on a system with 1GB RAM" is rather different to saying "this is a pile of crap".
Unless they're not even able to file factual bug reports on their own internal bug tracking systems, I have trouble seeing how this is the issue.
Having said that, a culture which practically makes it a disciplinary offence for a tester to file a bug report on the bug tracking system might explain rather a lot about the quality of some of Microsoft's products.
The main reason why it's hard to justify specialised hardware in PCs is that 9 times out of 10, CPU progress means that even if it isn't now, the CPU will be easily fast enough to handle 99% of end-user requirements long before they've made the return on investment on putting the extra hardware on the motherboard.
in fact it's perfectly legal for them to send bounty hunters over here, grab who they want, and ship them back to the US for tort.. err, sorry.. humane treatment. (Source).
No. It isn't perfectly legal at all. It's still kidnapping under UK law which applies because they're committing the crime on UK soil.
What they mean is "the USA backs these renditions and so will not comply with requests to extradite people who have been involved in carrying them out". Provided they can get themselves and their target out of the country before they get caught, they're free and clear. (This, of course, is easy enough - no doubt a plane would be ready and waiting at the nearest military airbase).
It's the warm fuzzy factor you need to account for.
You can provide a server room with a massive SAN backed up with the most fantastic support contract, redundancy at every step of the way and access times that desktop PCs can only dream of - but people seem to like knowing that the facility to use a drive that's physically sat on their desk exists.
Granted, any significant downtime of the SAN would affect a lot of people. But if you've already got a SAN you'd be using it as the backend infrastructure for a lot of business systems anyway, so significant downtime of the SAN would still affect a lot of people if they did have desktop PCs.
all you're talking about is replacing system drives that are so cheap they're practically free. How ?
SATA and PATA drives are so cheap they're practically free.
SAS and SCSI are substantially less cheap. Not staggeringly oh-my-god-I-will-have-to-sell-my-granny expensive, you understand. Probably about 3 - 5x the cost per gigabyte. That's before you consider that you'll want to RAID them, which adds more to the cost per gigabyte.
Fibre Channel is dearer still.
And if you start looking at proprietary interfaces like IBM's SSA (which is basically SCSI commands over a serial cable, but it predates SAS by several years and isn't compatible with it) you're looking at serious cash per drive. And with SSA, you need to put the drives into proprietary frames which only IBM make.
I can well believe that buying a SAN with enough disk capacity for the whole lot would work out a similar price to throwing a few dozen SSA drives and a new frame into the mix.
You know something? I bet they did.
But Microsoft have a reputation for not only encouraging their developers to run the latest and greatest version, but also giving them the best hardware with which to do it.
I wonder how many developers actually had easy access to a laptop with less than 1GB of RAM to run Vista on, let alone tried it.
Wild speculation, so mod me how you like.
Provided you happen to be an accountant who works in a movie studio.
Has anyone ever figured out the arithmetic to find out how much profit a given studio is making on the assumption that the takings they quote to people who should be getting X% of the total are accurate? I am pretty sure it would demonstrate a massive loss year-on-year.
We could spend all day here coming up with measures and counter-measures.
I would point out that an invisible proxy will still be used regardless of what proxy the customer themselves uses - but then the customer could use a proxy over a secure channel such as HTTPS.
I have known ISPs bar HTTPS web proxies (generally when they're providing a filtered service to organisations like schools) - but then you're in a constant arms race to list every secure proxy out there.
Assuming the RIAA (or whatever the Danish equivalent is) decides to push the issue further, sooner or later the ISP is going to have to stand up in court and say "Look, we've done all we can, we're haemorraging customers and it is plain impossible to make a block any more effective. If you order us to do so, the only way we can comply with such an order is to shut down. And if you do that, then it follows you'll have to do the same for every other ISP in Denmark."
Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS (their main strength) for mobile phones rather than making phones
Ha!
Seriously, use an iPhone (or an iPod touch, the UI's more or less the same) for 20 minutes and then tell me MS can design an OS which is of good use on a phone.
(Before anyone berates me for using an Apple product as an example, remember that most of the market buys something that they can use without wishing a slow painful death on the designers. Not something that offers every bell and whistle imaginable and makes 90% of them unusable).
Seriously, does no one advise upper management that trying to block something on the internet just draws *more* attention to it? Happens over and over.
Wouldn't do much good if you did. The court ordered it, so it must be done.
Any halfway-competent ISP could null-route the appropriate IP address(es) easily enough. If feeling really clever, they could even whip up a script which would automatically do an nslookup of www.thepiratebay.com and null route based on the results of that - meaning that the pirate bay switching ISPs would achieve absolutely nothing.
Combine this with a transparent HTTP and DNS proxy doing something similar, and it'd be very hard for the great majority of users to get to the pirate bay.
But they're a business. They're in it to make money, not lose customers. Makes far more sense to implement just enough so that if they find themselves back in court, they can explain that they have done all that they reasonably can, but the Internet is explicitly designed to deal with things being made inaccessible and this aspect can't be changed.
If a pharmaceutical company comes up with a cure for (say) AIDS, should they be forced to give it out to the rest of the world for free?
Erm... I interviewed with a pharmaceutical company some years ago and in the course of my research I discovered that they had invented a number of medicines which were on some sort of a list held by the World Health Organisation of "drugs which are so important to public health all over the world that international law states that they must be made available universally at a reasonable cost".
I didn't research this any further, but I'd expect any half-decent cure for AIDS to find itself on that list so quickly the pharmaceutical company would be saying "damn! wish we'd spent the money on trying to cure baldness!" quicker than you can say "retrovirus".
Seriously, there is not some nefarious conspiracy amoung all corporations to screw linux users. Corporations just want money, and this plan only makes money for the RIAA. Banks (for example) have far more money and lobbying power than the RIAA and are used to lobbying about regulation.
I never said there was. All I said was that the technology makes it possible, and in a very tightly secured corporate environment maybe even desirable - but I added that I didn't see it happening to home users any time soon.
But for the PC in my home I'm the party with the keys, not a third part, so no problem.
Have you missed the controversy regarding TCPA?
TCPA provides a mechanism for a system to cryptographically authenticate itself as having particular software/hardware.
It is therefore possible to devise a network which won't allow a system to connect unless it authenticates itself as having hardware/software on some "approved" list.
The technology isn't (yet) commonplace enough for that to have happened. But how do you feel about your bank saying "Users must use Windows (version) or later to connect to our website" and actually being able to enforce it such an extent that no amount of user-agent spoofing will help?
The nightmare scenario being espoused is that eventually so many systems will enforce this that the hobbyist market will be crippled - because nobody will even be able to connect to their ISP with hobbyist-developed software.
Myself, I don't see it coming to that. I think it's more likely to stop at institutions requiring a very high level of security being able to guarantee beyond any shadow of a doubt that the only computers plugged into their network are authorised, that authorised systems can be guaranteed to hold a specific software image and that authorised systems are effectively immune to viruses. But I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA try and push for it to be extended to home user's PCs - either through deals with ISPs or through legislation.
FWIW, I agree with you - TCPA has the potential to allow real policy enforcement in a business environment and eliminate a lot of spyware/virus problems - which can in theory be reduced already with Windows policies, but let's face it, there's almost always a way around those.
/.'ers lining up to agree to a similar system in a PC in their home.
But it's a double-edged sword. While there's nothing wrong with a third party deciding how the PC on your desk works in a business environment, I don't think you'll find many
My understanding is that defects are caused by imperfections in the wafer itself. The smaller process allows you to squeeze more chips onto the wafer but doesn't have any impact on the imperfections.
Then, no one will buy a new CPU. Intel and AMD aren't stupid. they know the consumer will run if they add this crap to thier products.
I hate to break it to you, but Intel think they've solved that problem.
They're starting to integrate the TCPA technology with something which business users will find genuinely useful and are likely to enable - vPro.
In brief, it's a mechanism to remotely manage PCs from a BIOS level upwards. But when you enable it (it's disabled by default), the TCPA functionality is enabled as well.
It doesn't take a great leap to see an OS which, on seeing TCPA functionality, uses it and cannot easily be persuaded not to use it. Right now, it's not available on everything - the cheapest PCs don't tend to support it. But that's filtering down rapidly, and all it requires after that is some bought legislation and/or technology licensing terms which state "where available, DRM functionality must be used".
In all likelihood, I believe the RIAA would prefer to make copyright infringement a capital offense.
I doubt it. It's rather hard to get money off a dead person.
14 years is just about as ridiculous as what the RIAA is proposing, the only difference is that it hurts people on the other side. Say what you will about riding a single work for a lifetime, but if someone's buying what you spent time to make, I'm sure you'd want a chunk of it, too.
What you're effectively saying is that anyone who produces any sort of intellectual property which becomes sufficiently popular should receive an exception to the rule of thumb which says "keep some of your money aside and put it into a pension scheme" which applies to practically everyone else in the developed world.
Why? The original purpose of copyright was to enable creative people to make a living from just doing the creative stuff - not necessarily riches untold for them and three generations succeeding them.
Evolution in very simple terms means "the members of the species who have the most babies are the ones who continue it". Logic would appear to suggest that in most cases, the members of the species best suited to their environment are the ones who have the most babies.
If intelligence isn't necessary in order for one monkey to reproduce a bit more than his rather dumb cousin, then it won't have much impact on which one makes the most baby monkeys.
So yes, evolution does have a hand in encouraging people to have sex. It is only human intelligence and compassion which acts as a brake to that.
There was also a "Morning After" treatment that showed promise for preventing infection after likely exposure to HIV. It was an 8 week course of drugs similar to chemotherapy but, if completed, had a significant success at preventing infection.
Bear in mind that this post is based on living with nurses who claimed to know these things, and I really haven't got time to find hard evidence elsewhere. Take it with as much salt as you think it needs.
Not only did it show promise, it's available - at least in the UK. But only to members of certain professions who have been exposed accidentally, eg. by a drug addict walking into hospital and stabbing the first doctor they see with a needle.
I'm also given to understand that HIV isn't particularly infectious a few months after the initial infection anyway. This, however, isn't something that's broadcast terribly loudly because the medical profession doesn't really want to encourage HIV-positive people to start having regular unprotected sex. (I can think of a few other things which would give rise to such an approach - "not particularly infectious != 100% not infectious", and "we've not seen it happen yet, but this is a virus and viruses mutate very quickly").
That's a hell of a guess, and there are at least three problems I forsee with it.
Assumption 1: that the developers are sufficiently motivated to continue Zimbra development that no amount of money Microsoft is prepared to give them will change this. Remember Zimbra is a potential competitor to Exchange, a major cash cow for Microsoft, so if they feel threatened, it's reasonable to assume MS will be prepared to spend quite a bit to get rid of that threat.
Assumption 2: That there exist no non-compete agreements that could affect Zimbra developers. A non-compete with Yahoo would probably be fine because Zimbra doesn't compete against any of Yahoo's other products. This isn't the case with MS.
Assumption 3: That Zimbra's licensing (which I believe is MPL with an attribution clause) doesn't put another company off. I forsee a slight problem with that - namely, I'm not sure who will want to develop a product to tout as an Exchange killer while at the same time attributing credit to Microsoft. Even if they do, how will Microsoft's lawyers feel about someone else to advertising their product as "Fred's Exchange-Alternative Groupware Platform (powered by Zimbra, a Microsoft product)".
The joy of OSS is that if Microsoft/Yahoo discontinue support of Zimbra, someone else can pick it up. If there's a paid "corporate" version, I'm sure a company picking up would include support to migrate. I know that isn't ideal, but it isn't a reason for mass panic either.
To be fair, I don't know much about Zimbra, but many opensource projects (including some reasonably big ones) are only really well understood at a code level by a relatively small team of people.
If most or all of those people are employed by Yahoo, then even if someone else does pick up the Zimbra project this is a major setback.
unique
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.