What Would Microsoft Do with Yahoo’s Zimbra? - Yahoo! News
What Would Microsoft Do with Yahoo’s Zimbra? - Yahoo! News
Or, perhaps this is Microsoft’s “out”… Basic premise, MS buys Y! which is doing a lot more to support Open Source these days. MS has always been viewed as anti Open Source because of the Linux debacle, among other things. Buying Y! gives them a way to get into the Open Source game, which is clearly the future for the foundation pieces of software, without having to give up on the Windows side of the coin. It allows them to handle it all through Y! and say they are taking the best ideas from Y! and merging them with their own.
Besides, in case Redmond hasn’t heard, all most popular open source is these days, is a cheaper, easier way to do n-way cost sharing between companies without all the legal hurdles of creating individual partnerships. Many of the best projects out there are supported by the likes of Y!, IBM, Sun, etc. and are hardly the domain of programmers hacking in their spare time. Open source just lets you focus on your secret sauce without having to build the infrastructure around it as much. Why build a web framework when you can get one for free? You business isn’t web frameworks, its _________. Why build a search engine, when you can use Lucene? You care about how search works in your application, not about the internals of search.
