How Open Source Email is Gaining Respectability

Not so long ago, only the residents of Geekdom (usually in academia) would attempt to architect an entirely open source email system. Architects normally assembled the system from an à la carte menu of email system parts. Hooking the pieces together required an

in-depth knowledge of email protocols and mail flow. (If you are a wannabe email geek, here's Carnegie Mellon's email system architecture.)

All too often, however, the architect may not have adequately documented the structure. The architect relies on the respective open source community of each part (e.g., IMAP or OpenLDAP) for support. Community members do assist each other, but the support may not be timely enough for a production problem. Consequently, an open source "build it" model for email is a scary venture -- particularly as businesses are so reliant on email communication.

Tarnished creditability is difficult to clean up.   

Nearly 100 percent of organizations have an email system, of which approximately 80 percent use IBM Domino or Microsoft Exchange. The remaining 20 percent are using systems from established vendors, e.g., Gordano, Ipswitch, Mirapoint, Novell (GroupWise), Oracle, Sun and many others. So... why would a vendor want to introduce a new email system into a market that is 100 percent saturated?

The commercial arm of an open source community (e.g., Sendmail.com versus Sendmail.org) is an active participant in the community, while providing for-fee enterprise-level support, packaging and upgrades. 

Start-ups with commercial open source email and messaging systems are gambling their futures on changing organizational beliefs about open source.

Nat Torkington's blog post Open Source Trends discusses four emerging trends about open source overall (underscores mine):

• Adoption - we've written the main apps, now the real challenges lay in convincing users to adopt it. Usability, marketing, and support.
• Freedom Wins - there are crappy business models built around half-hearted adoption of open source. Embrace open source's strengths, don't treat it as a weakness.
• Web 2.0 is Open Source - the web is built on open source, and the scaling and platform challenges for Web 2.0 are the challenges for open source.
• Open Beyond Source - the best practices of open source extending to proprietary software development, hardware, and data. 

Open source start-ups are riding on the wings of "computing freedom." Computing freedom is a reshaping of how technology is designed and implemented. It leverages the individual's relationship within a group (or community). Computing freedom is as much about social change as it is about technology change.

In the big picture, new open source email and messaging entrants, e.g., Jabber, Jive Software, Open-Xchange, Scalix and Zimbra, must "stay the course." The established email and messaging vendors see that open source is gaining respectability and, therefore, are building open source into their existing systems.