[CentOS] Email/GroupWare Suite

[Rainer Duffner]

Bo Lynch schrieb:
>
> Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning
> in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open
> source model.

The chance is always there.
I come from the BSD-world, where this is happening regularly (or
actually designed to happen).

Think about it: if outside contributions are minimal and lot's of people
offer services around the product without some sort of revenue-sharing,
the product will die one way or the other.
This is what happened with Nessus.
Zimbra is way too complicated to survive as a "pure"
non-company-sponsored GPL OSS-project.
It's in the same league  as OpenOffice IMO. Do you think OO would exist
without SUN sponsoring most of the devs around the main project?

In the BSD-world, it's a "valid" business-model to create some "fork" of
a technology, commercialize it and later release most of it back into
the tree.
Even in GNU-land, you have more and more GPL-products with proprietary
extensions for paying customers.

What I want to say is: I believe Zimbra chose their license not because
they wanted to cheat, but because they actually wanted to be able to
keep stuff open-source while at the same time ensuring the company's
commercial viability.

>  Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about
> using it and have to migrate to something else.
>   

Well, that's your choice.
AFAIK, apache also has a BSD-style license that would allow it to keep
the source for themselves - doesn't stop you (or most everyone) from
using it, I assume...

What happens to a product over one, two or three or more years is
anyone's guess.
Certainly, yahoo + zimbra have plans (that they don't want to share with
us, most likely) - but wether these plans can actually be put into
working is another question.

Release 5.0.x is out now and will be supported for quite some time.
Release 6.0 will arrive sometime next year. No change in license is
visible for it now.

I think Zimbra has always been profitable as a company, at least before
the Yahoo! acquisition.
If this continues, I don't see Yahoo making lot's of changes. (Well, in
an ideal world...)



cheers,
Rainer