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."

Not surprising in the least.

[juuri]

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.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

[bogaboga]

We better fork the entire Zimbra code before it's too late. I liked their idea, used it a few times via their demo website, but was never successful at getting their server installed on Ubuntu. Open source was as good [or bad]as closed source software in this case.

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.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

[ximenes]

Actually Yahoo is very open-source centric internally, its just that they aren't very good about giving things back. Which isn't to say that they never do (they've supported FreeBSD), but there is a sea of internal tools and modifications that no one ever bothers to release.

Not an "Office Suite"

[fm6]

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?

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

[Sherloqq]

According to Zimbra's own press release [zimbra.com], "Yahoo! is also a major proponent of open technologies and this combination is a further testament to how serious they are about their intentions. You will continue to see active participation in developer APIs and forums. We are committed to keeping the current source open and available for use and we will continue to offer the network version that will contain value added proprietary features on top of the open product."

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

[albalbo]

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.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

[Ilgaz]

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...

Yahoo exists thanks to Open Source.

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/ [yahoo.com]

They certainly have a problem in PR department if a slashdot user thinks Yahoo is not fond of open source.

Re:Not an "Office Suite"

[ZephyrXero]

Zimbra has been primarily focused on email (ala GMail, or Yahoo's own new beta webmail service), but they've recently begun working on adding office functionality [zimbra.com] (ala Google Docs & Spreadsheets, or ZoHo) to it's feature list. This would be really great for the business I work for as we'd much rather host our own web-based office stuff than lease it from Google or someone, and it's open source...I hope to God Yahoo doesn't screw Zimbra up.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

[albalbo]

We're saving the noise and partying for 1.0 ;)

Re:Not an "Office Suite"

[fm6]

Yeah, and MSOffice also includes an email client, which is one of the central apps in Zimbra. But Zimbra as I recall does not include word processing or spreadsheets, which are both basics of "office suites". Like I said, it's more specialized.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

[carlivar]

From the Zimbra press release [zimbra.com]:

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.

Reason: it's the Hula Project

[msimm]

I was curious too. Apparently after Novell chose to stop active (paid, full-time) development [novell.com] on it some people started a fork.