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How Microsoft-Yahoo Will Affect Open Source
jammag writes "If the marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo were to be consummated, GNU/Linux would be hindered, argues Roy Schestowitz. Yahoo's funding of open source initiatives would dry up. Yahoo, which acquired Zimbra, would lose its love for the open source competitor of Microsoft Outlook. The list goes on..."
All the more reason why this deal should NOT go through....Anti-Competitive ? I think Microsoft would axe Zimbra in a heart beat.
I'll be over here using Thunderbird/Icedove. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I used any Yahoo service or product. If Yahoo disappeared from the internet forever, I don't think I'd even notice. What does Yahoo even do that people find valuable anymore?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Roy Schestowitz is a non-entity who spends 18 hours a day crapflooding USENET (just page back and see who posts there), Digg, Propeller and any number of social bookmarking and discussion websites. This, aside from running who knows how many attack blogs that target Novell, Xandros, Linspire and many others beg the question of whether this is just a lonely poor student with no life whatsoever or a very organized group of people with some serious corporate backing.
Anyone deranged enough to post things like these should be, in my opinion, permanently ignored. The Microsoft-Yahoo merger needs to be analyzed from many angles by people who know what they're talking about, not by paid drones who regurgitate what they read in other blogs and are trying to make a name for themselves by disrupting communities to push their agendas.
Yeah, administrators of Zimbra based E-mail servers (like me) are starting to panic I think a Google bailout/business alliance could be, as one Zimbra developer described it, "manna from heaven".
Roy Schestowitz is ... a carrot!
I don't understand how it would effect Linux (much less the GNU utilities), but it might slow down a few Y! projects. These projects, even if MS succeeds and stops all development on them, will still be continued if someone in the community thinks they are useful. That's the beauty of Open Source.
BSD is dead, Roy Schestowitz confirms it!
ping yahoo.com
I don't know why but I always ping yahoo to troubleshoot my network connection. I guess I'll have to switch to ping 'google.com'
Zimbra is really designed to be an Exchange killer more than an Outlook killer- which, IMHO, is probably a lot of the motive for Microsoft to do this deal. Exchange is the one part of Microsoft's lineup for which no F/OSS solution exists, and thus remains a powerful argument for maintaining or expanding your Microsoft infrastructure.
It's very rare for mergers to be completely stopped by competition authorities. However, there are lots of cases where they insist on changes in the structure of the company. How about Microsoft divesting control of Internet Explorer and .Net? How about a requirement to increase the value of their Open Source code base by 50% each year? Now is the time to get your company to make useful suggestions to the competition authorities. Actual cases where MS have done harm will help. Specific evidence of their disruption of markets in ways detrimental to consumers is crucial. Remember it's not just increased prices; also examples where MS has killed potentially useful products, for example simply by making people afraid to invest in Open Source solutions are important too.
Remember, if you can do so safely and more or less legally, to ensure that any meetings you have with Microsoft representatives are recorded so that when your management gets turned by them you have enough evidence to stick it to them with the anti-corrurption authorities.
So much for the cathedral and the bazaar.
Alas, as Linux has gotten bigger and more complex, it is also requiring more capital to sustain itself as well, and capital means corporate funding. How ironic that the bazaar has grown to becoming a sprawling, flopping, traffic jammed, flea market, and suddenly key parts of the bazaar are suspiciously looking rather cathedral like (FireFox, the kernel).
I predict that within a few years, Linux will grow to the point that its advocates will quietly abandon the collaborative, libertarian rhetoric that drove it early on, and instead turn more towards a quest for government funding along the lines of National Public Radio. It will continually seek corporate sponsorship, even as it decries their existence.
This is my sig.
One way or the other I hope this gets resolved fairly quickly. We've been evaluating Zimbra where I work (a couple thousand users) and are getting close to a decision to fully adopt it. If MS buys Yahoo we'll likely have to start all over again. The last thing we want to do is invest heavily in a technology that MS will likely squash.
Is it called MicroHoo or YaSoft?
Should M$ aquire Yahoo! I sure hope my del.icio.us bookmarks will still be up and running. If so they better still work in FF/WindowsXP or FF/Kubuntu->Linux. Otherwise I'll just use the local FireFox bookmarks again. Backed up my bookmarks just in case... That would be a pretty big downer for my bookmarks to vanish or just stop working across different platforms...
Will the following work as intended?
Microsoft's only options are to either open up widely to Open Source, or to crush Google with its proprietary products - which will never happen. This only leaves Microsoft one option: encourage/use Open Source or die. They're simply too far in the hole and their products are rapidly becoming obsolete from the POV of the average-Joe user.
Absorbing Yahoo is going to be a mammoth task simply because of internal cultural differences, but trying to fight the tide of Open Source is a losing battle for Microsoft.
Health Insurance Quotes
I thought you were kidding about crap-flooding. This is his Google stats card:
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2006 155 407 917 368 1240 1611 1731 1860 1979 1395 1705 1781
2007 2100 1910 2104 1847 1844 1430 1664 1462 1301 1034 1032 1038
2008 1215
1000 posts a month is about thirty a day. He's been doing _at least_ 30 USENET posts a day, every day, for over two years.
With the impending departure of Bill Gates, I think a new Microsoft story icon is in order.
For that I don't think we need to go much further than the picture at the top of this story...
http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/yahoo-bid-bad-news-for-the-net-says-google/2008/02/04/1201973796947.html
You're using her as bait, Master!
From what I can tell skimming the YPL it takes nothing more than setting up a Sourceforge Project to fork each of these products. It was only a few years ago when Push&Pull JavaScript and a few guys competing with Exchange with a Web ASP were nothing but a handfull of nutcases.
Apart from the corporate fuled buzz Yahoo is putting behind YUI and the consited branding of Zimbra there is absolutely nothing for FOSS to lose with this MS-Yahoo deal. On the contrary. We're watching the evil empire blowing ca. 50 billion on a pipe dream about going head-to-head with Google in search. That's fine with me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I bet google has a company-wide party the day msft acquires yhoo.
Anybody, except for emotionally disturbed msft execs, can see that such a merger would weaken both companies: yhoo would suck even worse, and $20 billion in cash is not pocket change - even for msft.
Can't Zimbra be forked?
There are many implications for the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo merger for open source.
...etc. will end.
Microsoft will not continue to run on an open source platform, like they did with Hotmail.
- PHP: heavily used in Yahoo. Yahoo employs PHP founder and project lead Rasmus Lerdorf.
- Apache: Yahoo uses Apache heavily, and has many patches and modules for it. IIS will replace it.
- MySQL: likewise, they use it heavily. Expect MS-SQL in there.
- FreeBSD and Linux: they use them a lot. Expect those to be turfed for Windows.
- Yahoo YUI javascript library.
Yahoo also hosts open source events (e.g. OSCMS: Open Source Content Management Systems back in March 2007).
All the sponsorship money, paying salaries for open source leads,
This is not good news at all.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Ping av.com - it's shorter to type, is always up, and is a useful reminder that you can have a dominant position in the search market one year, and be practically unused the next.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
This guy quotes how Yahoo takes pride in running FreeBSD...
Running? Yahoo! is one of the largest infrastructure sponsors of the FreeBSD project and last time I checked even had people employed that are committers on the project. So yes, any take over of Yahoo! by Microsoft will no doubt put a huge dent into the FreeBSD Project's infrastructure that cannot easily be replaced in my opinion. So it's not just about running...
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Yahoo could do the open source community a BIG favor by releasing all of their programs under the AGPL v3, *just* prior to Microsoft buying them out.
If somebody up in Yahoo could do that big favor for me, it would be great. Thanks!
I have said it over and over again, let's fork Zimbra. Any [Zimbra] code we can lay our hands on should be forked...period...then we can debate what name we should call the product. I suggest "Zimbiya".
Not only does Yahoo servers run FreeBSD, Yahoo has core developers on it's pay role, and hosts the main WWW for FreeBSD.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
MS currently has 10% of the market share of the search engines. Yahoo has about 1/3. Google has about 50% or more. If MS aquires Yahoo, they will convert it instantly to being live.com and will exclude all Linux systems. My guess is that sites that use apache will slowly see their searches be pushed back further and further in the MS engine. IOW, this is designed not to just take on Google, but to move companies off of Apache as well as punish all those that are not using Windows.
And to think that just recently MS was released from Federal oversight. All of this makes a good case for either FTC to step in or for either IBM or even Sun to purchase Yahoo. Otherwise, those companies will see *nix take a HUGE hit on the net. For IBM it will hurt a bit, but for Sun, it will destroy them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc internet products are nothing more than fronts to the real business. In short, they are just like doubleclick. Remember them? Only difference is that also have a front store that's a search engine.
Most web advertising is handled by a few companies only. I named almost all of them.
Let's just say that yahoo's accounts that matter aren't it's free email accounts!
Slashdotters, if anything, are consistent in their selective usage of the "fud" tag and in the groupthink that its usage reflects.
Maybe if they purchase Yahoo they can get those BSD guys to come over and help with Windows 7. Instead of using the Windows kernel, they'll use a microBSD kernel.
Poof! Billions of Microsoft dollars gone up in smoke. So sssssshhhh... don't tell them they are making a very big mistake. Perhaps then they will start competing on valuable software and services.
Of course it does not really matter to GNU/Linux. Don't let fact get in the way of a good story!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As if NYT, and NY itself were not owned by M$ totally.
Just as I want to Yahoo to avoid AOL and Microsoft, I can easily bail from Yahoo should the deal go thru.
I have no loyalty anymore - if a software web portal stops working for me, I can ditch it with just one URL.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I hereby rename this company Microshoo!
You can't really blame them for cutting funding to open source. I mean they just wanked out $44 billion buying Yahoo, they gotta save money somewhere. Everybody knows open source people are a bunch of freeloaders, working together as a community. Really the digital equivalent to Chuds.
I have nothing compelling to say
Everyone seems to think that it will either be the best of times, or it will be the worst of times ... why can't it just be a different time?
Worst Of Times: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1962
Best Of Times: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9862772-16.html
-- The Hoss Man
I wonder what all this will mean for YUI (Yahoo! User Interface). Something tells me the Microsoft wouldn't be too keen on spending money to maintain and support an open-source JavaScript library whilst also trying to force Silverlight down everyone's throats...
Will Microsoft start sending out Vista CDs in the mail to try an boost the number of users?
Mine allows me to take a look around. Those blinders that you have on, have covered your eyes and does not allow you to see anything.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's not clear to me that Yahoo wants to be bought, maybe they do or they feel like they've done all that they can do but this sort of shows the value in what they are doing. They could approach Google, all the need is some short term cash to get things righted.
M$ has another two years to comply with documentation.
If people all over the world would gather money and buy yahoo, then make free as much software they could and, whatever there's no way to be made free, rewrite and release under free license. That would be awfully nice, have one big company, running totally free. A big and free search engine. A man can dream...
For example, they do most of the Zimbra development, created and maintain the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, contribute a reasonable stream of patches to Apache and MySQL, and employ the creator of PHP. The projects will all no doubt outlast Yahoo's contributions, but a major stream of revenue and employment suddenly drying up would slow things down.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In the case of Yahoo, I think it is somewhat unlikely (although not impossible) that Microsoft would dismantle Yahoo and try to replace it with its own set of internet services. Yahoo has been significantly more successful than Microsoft, and it would make more sense to simply make yahoo the web branch of the company, and move the top Microsoft web guys into Yahoo.
The fear is that Microsoft has too big of a case of Not Invented Here, and will make the Yahoo guys rebuild a lot of their stuff using Microsoft technology. That would be an enormous waste of time and would probably kill any gains from buying Yahoo, but it is something that many large companies do when they acquire smaller ones.
That said, if they are somewhat smart about it, they will just continue most of Yahoos programs and continue using Yahoo technology, at least for existing Yahoo products. What Microsoft has to offer in a Yahoo-Microsoft relationship is primarily money.
The article seems to suggest that Microsoft would necessarily kill all Yahoo use and development of open source technologies. That could happen, but I suspect that the Linux community, with its long held animosity towards Microsoft, or any company that produces a rival operating system (I know many Linux users who hate Apple vehemently, supposedly because it is "proprietary") is being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Microsoft has taken a progressively softer stance towards open source over the years, and now has a number of its own open source packages. Many zealots like to paint Microsoft as simply the enemy of open source, but that is an overly simplistic take on a rather complex issue. Large software companies don't see software licensing as a religious issue. For them it is a question of, how do we maximize return on investment?
I suspect they will look at a number of the open source program that yahoo is sponsoring and will keep them on a case by case basis. Some email client for linux is fairly likely to be killed, but some of Yahoo's more interesting projects, like Hadoop, might actually be useful to help Microsoft compete with Google in the same way they were useful to Yahoo.
Sorry, you don't qualify.
Hi there, As an Asian, I can tell you that Yahoo is big in Asia (at least in my country). Most people use yahoo messenger(msn, nope), and yahoo mail. So Microsoft buying out Yahoo would mean they would gain lots of users, not only in ym, but also groups. Also, the LUG which I am a member of is in Yahoo Groups (in fact many of the Open source groups in my country are in yahoo groups); in fact some support groups for open source projects are in Yahoo Groups (twinklephone, for example, which is an excellent SIP softphone). So to say that Yahoo isn't used anymore is simply wrong, and naive.
on *one* condition:
The Yahoo commercial should be changed to YaaaaMOOOOhoooo!
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
You missed yahoo developer. developer.yahoo.com. I have found some good information there and think it would be a shame if that went away. YUI development also.
I have run into a couple of coders that new nothing about coding except for what was on the MS developer sites. Really sucks when you have to point out to them that all of that functionality they just coded doesn't port to Firefox, Opera or Safari. The usual answer is that everybody uses IE. Except for 3/4 of our company. This is one of the best sites that I can send them to and tell them to start learning how to program functionality for other browsers.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
But I've been pinging google.com for years and it has never blocked them.
Even MS can't be serious about this deal. Note that they haven't actually done it, yet.
I think maybe they just wanted to yank everybody's chains.
expandfairuse.org
Msft can lock users into windows because sw/hw makers will only support windows, because windows owns 95% of the market.
But, yahoo? It's a bit of a pain to change email, but you are certainly not locked in.
So, IMO, you are exactly right. It is no problem to change web portals. Much of the market share, that msft thinks they are buying, will just transfer to google.
The Linux kernel is as free and gratis as it was the day Mr. Linus T. decided to GPL it.
It does not need corporate backing. We all benefit from that corporate backing, but the day the corps lose their marbles and stop supporting the only choice they have of having a fair, levelled playing field, then some bright kids will pick it up and continue squashing bugs and making improvements. And they will make big bucks while doing it.
At this point something very interesting has happened: the FOSS corps can't just abandon the FOSS projects, many companies that are their clients (I am sure most of the Fortune 100) would not take gladly lack of support for Linux based OSes that by now are everywhere in corporate datacentres.
So I predict Linux will continue growing, but not in the way you are implying.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is a bit disappointing and surprising to see that the author spent more time talking about Silverlight and moderation and other things when he could have written about the *other* open source things that Yahoo! either supports directly or where patches have been contributed. Where is the discussion about Hadoop, Pig, ZooKeeper, YUI, PHP, ... ? Do these not impact Linux users from his point of view?
A few comments. Ad hominem attacks are generally not a good thing because it is far more mature to attack the subject rather than the messenger. However in this case, the messenger IS the subject so is it really an ad hominem attack? As for Schestowitz, he is obviously being compensated for his 'work' because according to his web site he is a PHD student which is quite time consuming in itself. Where does he get time, and motivation, to host various boycott sites, post thousands of messages to USENET, digg, Propeller and various other sites? This is literally a 24x7 task given the huge number of messages, comments etc. And if you read his messages in comp.os.linux.advocacy, you can see that these are very long winded with comments, reference urls (usually referring to one of his own blogs) and quite oddly formated text. The logical conclusion is that he is being paid, and that this is a well organized campaign which is being funded. Also it does not appear to be humanly possible to accomplish what he is doing in a given 24 hour period unless the person is not sleeping, not working and certainly not studying and preparing for a PHD program. FWIW he has just posted a message in comp.os.linux.advocacy calling this entire thread an attack on him by shills. To me it looks like people are on to his purpose and are starting to ask questions of him as to his real motives and he doesn't like that. He makes the same complaints on digg.com BTW where he claims the same 3 people are stalking him and modding him down. That doesn't explain why his ratings are generally in the - double digits and several times have been in - triple digits. People just don't like spam and have no respect for what amounts to a paid spammer. He needs to learn this for himself but I doubt that will ever happen because he appears to be a classic narcissist.
If you want to HEAR Roy Schestowitz in action and get to judge for yourself how little he knows about the topics he discusses, just give a listen here: http://www.linux.com/feature/122470 D/L the mp3...That's Roy droning on and on until the moderator explains to Roy that he wanted to hear from someone else to start the conversation off. Bring a few cans of Jolt though because you will have a difficult time staying awake.
You are probably both sponsored by the same companies to crapflood, disrupt intelligent conversation and bring ridicule to free software, and you have both failed miserably at it.
The only thing silly little Roy has going for him is the fact that he uses his real name, whereas you hide behind sockpuppets and pretend you're someone else. You even fail at that as well, since lies are always harder to remember than the truth.
In short, you two should totally get together and form a club. Then you can leave the rest of us alone to discuss important issues.
Of course it is. Have you read anything by Stallman and company? Stallman is a socialist, but you are using Raymond's metaphors, and Raymond is as far from socialist as you can get (he is libertarian).
And Raymond was writing explicitly about the development process, and the development process fro Linux (the canonical "Bazaar" example) has become more like the development process described as "Bazaar" in TCatB, mostly thanks to first Bitkeeper and then git, which has decentralized the process further. If you want some weak irony, Emacs (the canonical Cathedral project) has also become more bazaar-like as the terms are used in the book, as the (still centralized) development has opened up. Emacs is roughly today where Linux was when the book was written.
Your comment seems to be based entirely by poor guesswork on the meaning of the bazaar and cathedral metaphor, combined with some justified but generalized prejudices about the free software community, but which you came to an "irony" that doesn't really exist your head.
The fact is that the leading ideologist, even on the socialist camp, has always welcomed corporate involvement. FSF helped start Cygnus, a company with the intended purpose of profit from free software. The founder, Michael Tiemann, read the GNU Manifesto and saw a business plan. Cygnus did contract work for FSF in the beginning when business was poor, later when they were established they helped FSF both directly with donations, and indirectly by doing the contract work for free they used to be paid for, finally they were bought by Red Hat, and helped Red Hat make their first profit. And if you read RMS' rants, he has always seen especially hardware manufactures as natural allies who just needed to be educated about their own interest.
And the other ideologist, Raymond, is firmly behind (and as the whole "open source" term is based solely upon) the idea the free software is good for business and business is good for free software.
That picture reminds me of the monster from the revived Dr Who episode Love and Monsters.
A quick search reveals that this Roy Schestowitz is the same guy behind boycottnovell.com (though the domain's registers don't seem to match those for schestowitz.com).
I don't know about you but for me this removes a lot of credibility from his claims (which, in good Slashdot fashion, I haven't read). I always found boycottnovell.com extremely FUDish (even though I, for many reasons, didn't like the Novell-MS agreement). The whole Novell-MS agreement taught me that some people from the Free Software or Open Source community will spread as much FUD as MS, or try to.
I'm not trying to make an ad hominem argument, just thought I'd mention who the guy was --as even if you disagree with my opinion of boycottnovell.com, I suppose you'll find this info useful.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Novell at the time but now I don't. I've been critical of many decisions by Novell (including the agreement with MS). Nowadays I work for the main competitor the eventual Microhoo would have.
From TFA: So what would be the destiny of Yahoo's own servers? It's difficult to tell, but it's possible that a switchover would be inevitable.
... I hate these phrases like the sport commentators' favourate "victory for XXX could be a certainty", and so on.
In other words switchover is not inevitable.
Great link! It was hard to stop reading it and put it aside for later!
As distingt from an anonymous coward like youself who spends 24 hours a day trolling slashdot and modding his own shit up Score:5, Insightful. You're probably the same turd that's been stalking Schestowitz over on Usenet.
If what Schestowitz has to say is valueless then why the relentless effort being spent in trashing his personal reputation. CmdrTaco, do you have to give space to anonymous fucks like the above?
davecb5620@gmail.com
MS is looking to make their engine be "good enough". If they have the MSIE ppl locked-in to it, then there is not a damn thing that Google can do. I suspect that if MS wins Yahoo, it would be end game.
And you, of course, being the paragon of all that is brilliant and non-biased on Slashdot, would certainly recognize one of your own.
Wow, you truly are losing it.
It's not good. It's better to have Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo compete.