Yahoo Becomes Apache Platinum Sponsor

jschauma writes "Yahoo published a press release announcing that it has become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. In their company blog, Yahoo points out their particular interest in the Apache projects Lucene and Hadoop, and that they have hired Doug Cutting, creator of both projects and VP at Apache. (Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia; Yahoo also provides hosting capacity to Wikimedia.)"

Comments

Tax Break?

[ookabooka]

I was curious, can you deduct money you give to the apache foundation as a charitable donation? They are a not-for-profit organization aren't they? It certainly would be an interesting way for companies to mess with their books.

Re:Tax Break?

[poopdeville]

No, unless they have incorporated as a charitable organization and not just a not-for-profit corporation. I don't believe the Apache Foundation qualifies to be a charitable organization, but that's for lawyers to argue.

Re:Tax Break?

[explosivejared]

WP says they are a 501(c)(3), meaning they solely exist to promote science. So any donation to them would be a tax exemption just like a regular charity.

Re:Tax Break?

[gbulmash]

If you can justify that you got something of value for it, you can deduct it as a business expense, which is as good as a charitable donation, when it comes to its impact on their taxes. I'd guess Yahoo! would classify it as a PR expense, but they might also classify it as R&D. Depends on what their tax lawyers say to classify it as.

- Greg

Re:Tax Break?

[jaaron]

We have incorporated. Please see my other comment. Apache is a legal US charity.

Re:Tax Break?

[wdr1]

Rumor spreads that Google is helping an open source project & Slashdot falls over with praise.

Yahoo helps open source & the first question is "Hey, are they cookin' the books?"

Go figure.

-Bill

Go Yahoo

[cumin]

I gave up on Yahoo many years ago and moved to Google in preference. More and more lately, with improved search results, useful information, less restrictive email, and now support for one of my favorite OSS projects, they lure me back.

Keep up the good work Yahoo.

Re:Go Yahoo

[Temporal]

Err... It's great of Yahoo to do this and all, but as others have pointed out, Google was already a platinum sponsor of Apache, and until now was the only platinum sponsor.

Google also contributes directly to the Linux kernel, GCC, Mozilla, and many other projects, funds tons of open source development via the Summer of Code program, releases many of its own projects open source (from small things like its Java collections framework to huge things like Android), provides free hosting for open source projects, etc.

Not trying to diminish Yahoo's contributions -- they release plenty of code too -- but just saying that you can hardly claim Google doesn't do enough for OSS.

Re:Go Yahoo

[wannabgeek]

You mean something like this http://search.yahoo.com/ ?

Re:Go Yahoo

[Yetihehe]

I like clean start pages too. So I'm using this

Truly do no evil?

[Veroxii]

Is it just me, or is Yahoo really what Google purports to be these days?

Mmmmmm....

Re:Truly do no evil?

[BeanThere]

Yup, and Yahoo never collaborates unethically with the Chinese government. But hey, if people want to believe Google is more 'evil' than the others, I guess people see only what they want to see, or rather, what media FUD campaigns want them to see.

If Everyone

[gbulmash]

I wonder what would happen if everyone who was using FOSS software like Apache actually supported it? I'm not talking sending your favorite Linux distro the cost of Vista Home Basic, but like $20 spread across your four or 5 favorite projects. I donated to OCAL earlier this year, but I really need to send a Christmas present to the guys at Inkscape. This story's a good reminder.

- Greg

Lucene and Wikipedia

[Blue Trapezoid]

I hope Yahoo taking an interest in Lucene involves them making heavy improvements to it. Wikipedia's search is the worst.

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[Titoxd]

Wikipedia's search is crapola, and everybody and their dog knows that. However, It is not because of limitations with Lucene; it is more caused by limitations with MySQL. The MediaWiki database backend stores the text of pages in an InnoDB database, and InnoDB was used because it provides more robustness during simultaneous read and write operations (or at least that is what I understood). However, InnoDB does not allow for the creation of full-text indices, like those needed for Lucene search; MyISAM databases are required for that. So, there is an expensive replication task from the text table to the search tables in MediaWiki.

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[otisg]

Wikipedia search may not be great, but Lucene itself is an amazing toolkit. I tend to think that without Lucene half of the companies that have some kind of a search companies (think Web2.0) wouldn't know what to do.
Lucene is great and free. FAST, Autonomy, Google Appliance, Endeca, etc. are all *massive* and *expensive*. Compare that to the free and super-flexible Lucene! Oh, and it's not like there is no professional support and services around the Lucene stack! Just look at http://sematext.com/ and its client list and you'll see some big names.

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[Frosty Piss]

According to THIS, Google runs MySQL for AdWrods.

Here is some more about Google and MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/customers/customer.php?id=75

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

You're about 20% right. INNODB doesn't support full text searching, which is why wikipedia uses Lucene.

Luecene, however, has no relationship to mySQL at all. It's a totally separate entity that stores its indeces on the *file system* in its own binary format.

You can use lucene to index myISAM, innodb, Oracle, or just a bunch of text files you have sitting around. In no way is it dependent upon the existence, or capabilities, of mySQL however.

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[vhogemann]

I guess that there's two search mechanisms in place at wikipedia, one search for the exact title of the article, and anoter is a fuzzy full text search. The first one is provided by MediaWiki, and the second one is powered by Lucene.

The title search takes only exact matches, and probably that's the crappy one.

Google donates too

[Dashcolon]

All you gents lauding Yahoo for being a platinum donor in comparisons to Google should take a look at Apache's donation thanks page, where google is also listed as a platinum donor

Re:Google donates too

[linguizic]

All you people reminding us that Google also contributes to Apache need to keep in mind that Google has allot more money than Yahoo! does. This isn't a pissing contest between the two companies--it's just good news.

Yes, Apache is a legal US charity (Re:Tax Break?)

[jaaron]

Yes. Apache is a US charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. See the donation FAQ.

Furthermore, Apache is still almost completely a volunteer organization. The board members, officers and members do not take a salary from the donations. The only paid staff the ASF now has include a PR person, a system administrator, and a part-time secretary.

Disclaimer: I'm an Apache board member.

Google is also an Apache Sponsor

[jaaron]

Google is also an Apache platinum sponsor. We're happy to have both of them involved!

Wikipedia, eh...

[Frosty Piss]

Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia...

This is not meant to be a troll, though many may take it that way, but if Lucene is what Wikipedia uses, than either Lucene needs a lot of work, or Wikipedia just isn't implementing it right. Wikipedia's search is just about one of the most unforgiving search functions on the web; unless you hit the spelling perfectly, you often simply will not find what you're looking for, and better not have any extraneous words in the search string either. Which is why I use Google to search Wikipedia...

Like a new drug?

[RealGrouchy]

One of the theories of why violent crime spiked in the late '80s is that crack cocaine was new on the market, and so the territories among the drug lords had to be established and drawn--often through violent means. After the dust had settled and the lines were established in the early-to-mid '90s, violent crime came down somewhat (both in cities like New York that had spent oodles of money on "tough-on-crime" measures, and in places where no additional resources had been allocated).

Every time I see things like Google latching on to Firefox, or the ones referenced in TFA(S), I can't help but think that Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. are simply snatching up open-source "territory".

I wonder what it means and where it will lead...

- RG>

Re:Go Yahoo (Their webhosting still sucks)

[Z80xxc!]

I agree that it is great that Yahoo is supporting Apache in this way. However, their webhosting (which uses apache, by the way) is still miserable. I'm not talking geocities, I'm talking their Small Business hosting that they tout as being so great. One of the websites I maintain is hosted by Yahoo Small Business. It is possibly the most restrictive host I have ever had to use. The user has very little control over apache settings, and in fact cannot even edit the .htaccess files. The strange, unintuitive, dumbed-down interface is so annoying that working from a computer without ftp access is excruciating. So, yes this is a step in the right direction, but their web hosting services still leave much to be desired.

Parent is WRONG, not "Insightful".

[Eivind Eklund]

Lucene is a full text indexer. It does NOT need MySQL full text indexing; it does full text indexing all by itself. This is a primary point.

If Wikipedia had used MyISAM (or MySQL hadn't tied full text indexing to their storage engines), Wikipedia could have used MySQL full text searches instead of Lucene. That is a completely different matter, though.

So, please, mod parent to oblivion. (And when do we get a "Wrong" moderation? It could be a warning to moderators to look before they mod things up again...)

Eivind.