Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Obviously a company that’s taken in $30.5 million dollars needs an exit, and for the Zimbra Group $350 million from Yahoo! is not a bad chunk of change. However, as a user of Zimbra, I can’t help but feel a little apprehensive about a great open-source product going under the wing of a company without a lot of OSS cred. More troubling is the phrasing of the post on the Zimbra Blog stating that “We are committed to keeping the current source open and available for use.” No mention is made of the continued existence of the open-source edition. Nor is open-source mentioned on Yahoo!’s press-release or on thier blog.

The Zimbra team’s already built a fantastic product, and one that I enjoy using every day. It’s the best self-hosted email client I’ve used and with the resources of Yahoo! it should get even better. Hopefully they’ll keep the open-source edition around for those that don’t need Blackberry and Exchange integration. It’ll be interesting to see in the coming weeks how the product progresses and what changes, if any, occur with the licensing.

Updated:
Zimbra’s latest blog post clarifies their position and suggests that there are no imminent changes planned to their licensing scheme.

I probably have too many computers. Often, this leads me to need some version of some source code on one box, that only exists on another. I used to check into a temporary branch, then check out from that branch, but that often leads to unpleasant merge problems. Another thing I’ve tried is just using scp to transfer files, but that can be time consuming with a slow connection or a lot of source. I can’t believe it took me this long to think of it, but the most sensible solution is to use rsync.

To pull the files from the computer with current source to older source navigate to your source directory and type:
rsync -avuz new.source.machine:workspacedir/sourcedir . (don’t forget the .)

To put new changes back, it’s just:
rsync -avuz . new.source.machine:workspacedir/sourcedir

You also might want to add the --delete option if you’ve been doing a lot of refactoring.

Another thing I ran into is that Eclipse doesn’t really like adding new projects directly to the workspace. The work around I’ve found is to make sure the project exists within Eclipse on the machine you want to work on before attempting to rsync.