tecosystems

links for 2007-04-04

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  1. Zimbra is a good example of a company that’s providing a technically open source product, but is hardly an open source company. They ship a whole bunch of third-party software (OpenLDAP, postfix, mysql, clamav, sasl, tomcat) rather than working out how to integrate into existing systems, despite saying for more than a year that they’d like to: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/showthread.php?t=181

    But the real deal-breaker, even ignoring the questionable license, is “can I build it from source?”, *source* being an important part of “open source”. In Zimbra’s case, the answer is no, particularly when their instructions don’t work and you have to rely on someone else’s attempts:
    http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Building_the_software_yourself
    Hell, even the Gentoo install procedure involves setting up a Debian chroot http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Building_Zimbra_on_Gentoo

    Compare this to zenoss, which also ships its own zope and python, but a) expects people to build from source b) is far more receptive to the community packing their software so it fits in with the distro: http://blog.zenoss.com/

    Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on Zimbra, but they really don’t seem to be engaging with the community much. Oh, and their sourceforge SVN repository is just synced from a private repo, so the commit messages are all “Automatic update”.

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