I think one main thing is "Either these things matter to your client or
they don't.". If there were a base product or a series of products that
just needed assembling to be as good or better then Exchange. I would
think a group of people could stitch it all together in a way that would
be sellable. Unfortunately I think there are some missing pieces.

I think a big set of use cases would be helpful. The other thing as a
developer that comes to mind is SVN being a better version of CVS. We
need free software version of exchange that from its beginnings was
designed by the hive mind :)

ex.
Should be able to be do online backups
Should be able to run as a cluster of machines so load could be distributed
... etc


What I think is that if there were the equivalent of Apache but in the
Collaboration space that would be great. All the current players I think
 are Commercial Open source that means they have investors or
shareholders to answer to. If there was a solution available I think
people such as Bryan could advocate using it in place of exchange.

Did this search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=exchange+replacements&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=100&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=y&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images

Found
http://zarafa.com/
which is different from Zimbra do not know anything about it.

You also have these companies that have already written a bunch of stuff
and then decide to open source it. This generally does not work because
the requirements were gathered by a single company trying to solve a
problem on their own. I think Mozilla was mired with issues at first for
some of the same reasons.

> Either these things matter to you or they don't.
> 
> Craig
> 
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