Yahoo Seeks Open Source Community Support

itwbennett writes "Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said. These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo."

Messenger

[MonsterTrimble]

Release the protocol on your messenger service. The rest I could care less.

Let Me Translate The Article For You...

[quangdog]

These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.

Uhm, here's a bunch of code we wrote that is mostly useless to us. Let's bestow it on the unwashed masses and see if they can make it useful.

The company has to first make sure that each of the technologies will really be useful and provide significant value outside Yahoo, before releasing it to open source, Chaiken said. It takes time and effort to go through the open source process, and to build a community around open source, so the company has to first make sure there will be interest from developers, he added.

Let's float some new stories to some techie sites to see if anyone would like to fix our stuff for free.

Releasing technology to the open source community helps Yahoo build recognition and a technical brand in the technical community, and also develop relationships with universities and companies, Chaiken said. There could also be some financial benefits in getting community developers to work on a project, he added.

We love free labor.


In all seriousness, this article seems like a non-story to me. Some huge corp is releasing stuff that they don't find very valuable in an attempt to see if someone out there can make it valuable for free. I'd be a whole lot more interested if they were releasing something that was already a technological breakthrough. Using the open source community as your free labor drones just feels wrong.

Re:releasing stuff

[TaoPhoenix]

I'd prefer to be a little less bitter. We all know that if a corp finds stuff valuable, they play all those "Intellectual Property" games. So if they're sitting on some misc code, sure - we'll take free stuff, *because they can't (easily?) take it back.*

Never underestimate brilliant hacks out of "worthless" stuff. It's what invented the shredder industry, and post-it notes, and silly putty.

Re:Let Me Translate The Article For You...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, having been on the inside, they really have a lot of cool technologies that I'd love to see shared.. because I miss them.

Y! has (off the top of my head):
  - Their own package management system tailored to help keep track of what is deployed where and help solve dependency issues
  - A filtering system similar to PHP's built in filter functions, but way, way better
  - A site vulnerability scanner

They recently open sourced their load balancing system, which is pretty cool:
https://github.com/yahoo/l3dsr

Say what you want about the company, they have/had a lot of talented engineers who built a lot of helpful and useful things