Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Discuss your pilot or production implementation with other Zimbra admins or our engineers.
Klug
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by Klug »

I just got spammed by Synacor (through Zimbra Blog).

They've decided to close-source the product but they do dare to market the product like this:
Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty
Zimbra 9’s dependable server infrastructure provides the security, privacy and data sovereignty Zimbra customers have come to expect, and in many cases, require.
Amazing.
Data sovereignty in a closed-source product.
phoenix wrote:I'm looking at Kopano but it's a bit tortuous to install still, as you say, there's about four years to get it sorted. :)
In the meantime, NextCloud might endup having a usable/nice webmail and will be the turnkey solution.
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by quanah »

I'm curious how they meet the various licensing requirements of all the FOSS they use now that they've gone closed source.
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by yllyxzmz »

Unbelievable. Well, believable, I suppose, given recent history, but still.

I've been on the Zimbra bandwagon since the beta in 2005. I've deployed OSE servers and NE servers alike, but the viability of the OSE version for at least certain scenarios was the foundation of my committed support to Zimbra over 15 years and got me through the whole LiquidSys->Zimbra->Yahoo->VMWare->Telligent->Zimbra->Synacor (did I miss one?) string of fiascos.

Truly a sad day for open source, or even open communication. I feel like this whole situation has been manipulated, and they're still trying to dance around the closing of the source. We've been strung along by Synacor for years now with nothing new in the open source edition, and we see more and more clearly every day why, and now we're seeing it shut down explicitly. Amazing. All those previous companies didn't close the source. Sure it was jarring, sure direction changed every 15 minutes, but it wasn't until Synacor that we finally lost this longtime, major open source project.

If you think about it, this is really, really disgusting. For all the deserved vitriol flung at Oracle from the open source community and the panic ensuing their purchase of Sun, they didn't close MySQL and are still developing major improvements to it They sort of closed their specific bundling of Java, but they still made it possible for compatible builds to be released by RedHat and others. OpenOffice stayed open until LibreOffice supplanted it. So yes, Oracle is bad, but Synacor is just that much worse. I know that Zimbra doesn't have the cache that some of those projects do (especially as on premises email is on the decline), and therefore this won't get as much media play. But I really can't think of a more disgusting example of closing off an open source project than this. Embarrassing.
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by feva »

phoenix wrote:I'm looking at Kopano but it's a bit tortuous to install still, as you say, there's about four years to get it sorted. :)
In the meantime, NextCloud might endup having a usable/nice webmail and will be the turnkey solution.[/quote]

Unfortunately, nextcloud mail is just an IMAP client (like roundcube) on top of a collaboration platform, and it doesn't look like changing that is on their roadmap.

Also, for users of Zimbra Community on Ubuntu, April 2023 is probably the recommended end-of-the-line as that is when Ubuntu 18.04 reaches extended support (which requires a Canonical subscription) - I doubt we will ever see packages for Ubuntu 20.04. Plan accordingly if that affects you.
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by zimico »

Klug wrote:I just got spammed by Synacor (through Zimbra Blog).

They've decided to close-source the product but they do dare to market the product like this:
Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty
Zimbra 9’s dependable server infrastructure provides the security, privacy and data sovereignty Zimbra customers have come to expect, and in many cases, require.
Amazing.
Data sovereignty in a closed-source product.
phoenix wrote:I'm looking at Kopano but it's a bit tortuous to install still, as you say, there's about four years to get it sorted. :)
In the meantime, NextCloud might endup having a usable/nice webmail and will be the turnkey solution.
Maybe the reason of above Synacor's statement is "a source code license will be made available to customers who are licensing Zimbra Network Edition."?
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by GlooM »

Please specify. Zimbra 9 will only be available as paid version (NE), or it will be available as free but closed source version? If I don't need to see open source, can I use the product for free (without Modern UI)?
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by JDunphy »

An additional data point. Just noticed they are upgrading certified wiki articles so even products under technical guidance is having documentation removed.

Example: with 8.7.11
https://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title ... ldid=66653

Lasted update without technical guidance support for 8.7.11
https://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title ... ldid=66874

As a network subscriber since 2005, the new direction which started with not allowing open source users to file bug reports has made the product less robust in the past 2 years IMO. Does anyone know if they will allow a perpetual license for network customers who don't need chat, imap with problems with certain MUA and other attack vectors ,like webRTC/Turn/webdav into their corporate networks. It is probably time to fork this thing and move with a version that is only open source and to back fill functionality through the zimlet interface. Does anyone see zextra's taking that lead role of producing a release when Zimbra moves to commercial releases only? That would give me peace of mind of staying with the commercial version if I knew there was a backstop should I need to get off.

Jim
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by smothemh »

Just curious - anyone interested in forking and starting a new project? just a thought - I certainly don't have the time but would jump over if someone did. I'm not even sure how hard that would be.
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by phoenix »

JDunphy wrote:As a network subscriber since 2005, the new direction which started with not allowing open source users to file bug reports has made the product less robust in the past 2 years IMO.
I'd second that, do you think that's how they tried to encourage developers to contribute to the product by hiding all the bug reports? :)
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Re: Zimbra 9 now available - in case anyone missed the blog post

Post by JakeMS »

From this thread, I've also started looking into Kopano, a bit of information for others looking - the website you want is "kopano.io" for the open source version, this isn't mentioned very well on their commercial website.

With that said, It's actually a fairly interesting alternative. :ugeek:

Officially they only offer nightly builds (For free), but if like me that sounds like a crazy idea for a production environment... there is Debian as an option, as it appears to be included in the Debian repositories:
https://packages.debian.org/search?lang ... rds=kopano

This means you can install simply using "apt-get install kopano-core", and it allows using the system default versions of postfix, clamav etc. And of course, a non-nightly stable version... this is actually sounding very promising. :D.

I sometimes disliked how with Zimbra you couldn't easily update a single component such as ClamAV without some big hacks :roll:.

And the open source version has an official supported backup process :o :shock:

Although, there are a few missing things such as information about enabling DKIM etc. But it does appear to be a viable option, but with a lot more work necessary to get it running, and a somewhat lack of documentation.

However, being included in a distributions official repository is a good sign towards the open source side of things. So Kopano has jumped to the top of my "possible" alternatives list.

Anyhow, just my notes so far for anyone interested :).
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