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Wikia Acquires Grub, Releases it Under Open Source

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the more-fodder-for-the-cannons dept.

An anonymous reader writes "During a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available for download and testing."

3 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. wait a second by wwmedia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    WIKIA is a for profit company!

    so they want to use other peoples spare CPU cycles to build an empire on top without spending money on servers?

    rofl!

    all them spare cpu cycles would be better used for distributed research like Folding@Home and other @home projects

    1. Re:wait a second by kebes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I use Google search, which is produced by Google Inc., a for-profit company. I use the search "for free," but then again I "pay" with my eyeballs, since the search pages have ads. This is a trade-off that I (and many others) are willing to make.

      So why is it so crazy to think that users would be willing to participate in a search engine where you "pay" with your spare CPU cycles? If the search engine generates useful results, it seems like a fair trade-off for me.

      I'm not sure what Wikia's business model is here. It's probably not ads, since it would be difficult to reliably enforce and bill an ad-pushing system using software that is open-source and a network that is peer-to-peer. Probably they hope that this will drive more traffic to Wikia projects, or somesuch.

      But, ultimately, I don't see what's so crazy about a for-profit company and end users coming to a mutually beneficial agreement. I donate CPU cycles and bandwidth, and get access to search results. Sounds fair to me. If the result is useful and the terms-of-use not onerous, most users will happily use it.

  2. Re:FIST SPORT by Ltar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How do you expect him to get first post if he reads the summary?