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."

Agreed

[porkThreeWays]

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.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

[mabhatter654]

That would be correct. Note how Google has Google Labs and Google Code... If they're not playing to the slashdot/digg crowd, then they're not playing in the same game as Google!

Re:But what happens if MSFT buys Yahoo?

[carlivar]

Yahoo is, what, 95% FreeBSD and Linux? I just laugh at these Microsoft rumors. I seriously doubt Microsoft's pride would ever allow them to acquire that much open-source software. They probably realize it would be nearly impossible to convert to Windows, too. At the very least they'd probably lose over 50% of Yahoo's engineering staff if they tried such a thing.