The announcement published on Zimbra’s site states that VMWare will has acquired Zimbra from Yahoo. It is apparent that VMWare has it’s sites set on entering the cloud in a bold way, and this move places them in competition with Gmail.
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is available as an open source community supported version, a closed source and a hosted version. ZCS offers features that rival MS Exchange including active syncing of calendars and contacts to mobile devices in the commercial version.
It is interesting to note that Zimbra like Kerio runs on Mac OS X and Linux, where as the later also runs on Windows and is not open source. The open source edition is available in for porting to other operating systems but has yet to be ported to any of the other BSDs besides Mac OS X.
Although VMWare claims that they value Zimbra’s open source community, only time will tell if the thin air will affect their decisions.
