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."

Comments

how significant is this?

[poetmatt]

Seeing yahoo open up their information excluding whatever core technology might not allow much if anything to be used, but that also might not be the scenario here. Can anyone comment who knows about the software source behind what they are supposedly opening up? Is this a big deal?

Re:how significant is this?

[bberens]

Honestly I'd be surprised if opening 100% of their algorithms and such would be detrimental at this point. The sheer capital requirements of getting into the search indexing game at this point make it a non-starter for all but very large companies. And those big companies would have a hard time growing into anything resembling competitive with a "real" technology shop.

Re:how significant is this?

[Coeurderoy]

No but revealing for example the add targeting process might be an issue, for competitive, regulatory and marketing reasons.

And you need to make sure the comment and code elements are not offensive, make sure there is nothing like

if (luser.category() >= cluless) luser.serve(advertisement[lies].bulshit());

switch (luser.machine() ){
case Windows: luser.category(iq_eval.reduce()): break:
case MAC : luser.category(toy_addiction.increase()); break;
case Linux : luser.category(cussness.increase(tothemax)); break;
case BSE : luser.category(cussness.increade(overthemax)); break;
default : luser.call_police(weirdo); break;
}

Re:how significant is this?

[CAIMLAS]

Here's a guess as to why it won't be able to be leveraged: it's written for FreeBSD 4 or something similarly archaic.

Did you say open source?

[cultiv8]

Begin MS bashing in 5... 4... 3...

Re:Did you say open source?

[vadim_t]

Defensive much? I don't see a reason to mention Microsoft at all.

Re:Did you say open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a desperate plea for attention. Microsoft is becoming less and less relevant.

Re:Did you say open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

at 2!

Re:Did you say open source?

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, that lasted all of 10 seconds:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2057576&cid=35640278

Re:Did you say open source?

[Tsingi]

It's a desperate plea for attention. Microsoft is becoming less and less relevant.

Heh, I think it was an offensive out of left field generic call for M$ bashing.
i.e. What you said.

Re:Did you say open source?

[cultiv8]

Eh, my first time being modded as a troll. Such a thin line between "troll" and "funny"...

Re:Did you say open source?

[Jessified]

I thought he was alluding to Microsoft's fear of open source. That is, "Begin Microsoft's bashing of Yahoo for going open source in 5...4...3..."

But I could be wrong, I don't really speak troll.

Re:Did you say open source?

[Whalou]

That line is known as the humor line.

Re:Did you say open source?

[digitig]

In the UK it's the humour line, so we can push things 20% further.

Messenger

[MonsterTrimble]

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

Re:Messenger

[eugene ts wong]

I thought of the messenger service as well. It is very frustrating to have a messenger client that no longer works, just because the company changed the protocol.

That being said, a few things that I could think of are having better ways to upload information to Yahoo! Notes, and syncing Calendar and Contacts. I'm sure that there are more.

Re:Messenger

[betterunixthanunix]

Better idea: switch to Jabber, or at the very least provide a gateway of some sort. Why do we need the Yahoo Messenger protocol?

Re:Messenger

[MonsterTrimble]

Jabber is missing a lot of stuff which Yahoo messenger does very well - like photo sharing and video chat. When I have to defile myself by using XP (about once a month for MS Publisher) Yahoo messenger is still by far the best chat client I have used - closed and open source.

Re:Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

How much less could you care?

Re:Messenger

[devent]

The Jabber protocol can be extended, for example with the Jingle protocol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)

Would be awesome if everyone would be using just Jabber XMPP protocol, so I can chat with my client to Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, and the other way around too, and we would use an open protocol, that means that I could have multiple clients to choose from. Like that everybody is using the email protocol (POP3, IMAP, SMTP), everybody wins.

Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. would be competing on who's have the best client and who's offers the best service and not how well they can lock in the users. How about that the EU steps in mandate to them the open protocol? Like they mandate the use of EU power plugs and EU norm lamps.

Re:Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

{Grammar Nazi}
(from item header)
  "but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage"

It should be "doesn't".

(From MonsterTrimble)
  "The rest I could care less."

It should be "couldn't".

{/Grammar Nazi}

Now, granted, if the Yahoo! folks were to release their YIM code so the folks at Pidgin, Astra, Digsby, et. al., could integrate their much superior products to work with it, then fine. Among the other offerings from Yahoo!? I stopped worrying about them back when Ziff-Davis ceased publication of the Yahoo! magazine. There has been nothing that Yahoo! has brought to the world that some other entity hasn't done better, faster, or more efficiently.

Sorry, but I see Yahoo! as a dinosaur caught in the tar pit of the internet. Maybe, 10 or 20 years from now, there'll be some cyber-paleontologist digging up the remains, and wondering what this "Yahoo!asaurus" was once like.

Field Marshall Erring Gon Rong, Blue Pencil Division

Re:Messenger

[Anrego]

It always felt to me that jabber just never caught on... and at this point probably never will. I think part of the reason is said extendability and flexibility. Non-geeks want something that they just "download this" and start chatting. As soon as they need to start making choices, the game is over.

I always liked the idea, but if your circle of non-geek friends arn't using it, doesn't do you much good. As for my geek friends, we mainly use IRC.

Re:Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

That api seems to be available here: http://developer.yahoo.com/messenger/

Re:Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some implementations
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Messenger_Protocol#External_links
2. http://libyahoo2.sourceforge.net/

Re:Messenger

[geminidomino]

Non-geeks want something that they just "download this" and start chatting. As soon as they need to start making choices, the game is over.

Like the Google Talk client built into their GMail UI, perchance?

Re:Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

It always felt to me that jabber just never caught on... and at this point probably never will.

Yeah, if only Jabber could get the backing of a major software company like Google or Facebook. Too bad that will never happen..

Re:Messenger

[FrankieBaby1986]

I'm currently connected to Facebook chat and of course google chat via jabber, using Pidgin. I find it more reliable and useful than leaving a browser open to FB.

Re:Messenger

[petteyg359]

Give me a YUI Compressor alternative that "some other entity has done better, faster, and more efficiently" :) I've tried several, and haven't found anything better yet.

Fingers Crossed

[danbuter]

It would be nice to see some good database tools become OGL, or even get the BSD license. The various open source projects can hopefully at least cherry-pick some parts for their programs.

Didn't they flirt a bit too much w MS?!

[G3ckoG33k]

Didn't they flirt a bit too much w MS?!

How about the Bing/Yahoo hegemony?

Re:Didn't they flirt a bit too much w MS?!

[Tsingi]

I don't use Bing, or Yahoo. I always found Yahoo to be slightly offensive, too commercial. I could be wrong, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times (over the lifespan of the public Internet) the number of times I've been there.

I've tried Bing, it seems to work, so I can only say, with admitted bias, that I hate it because it's M$oft.

Gimme that olde tyme open source.

Re:Didn't they flirt a bit too much w MS?!

[Coeurderoy]

I stopped using Yahoo when it stopped being a service directory to morph into a mix of portal/search engine...

I do not see Portal as a replacement of CNN/others...
And google provides a more streamlined user experience (although I'm started to be irritated by the ammount of "help" it provides me, particularly because for some reason it does not believe that I'm interested in relevant content not in "tailored for french no latin america nor whatever other tailoring it does..."

And I see very personally how it now has the power to do "friendly censorship"... of course if you "know it exists" you can still with some effort see it, but "accessible reality" is shaped by google,and that is scary (well bing would be even scarier ...)

Re:Didn't they flirt a bit too much w MS?!

[Tsingi]

I stopped using Yahoo when it stopped being a service directory to morph into a mix of portal/search engine...

I do not see Portal as a replacement of CNN/others... And google provides a more streamlined user experience (although I'm started to be irritated by the ammount of "help" it provides me, particularly because for some reason it does not believe that I'm interested in relevant content not in "tailored for french no latin america nor whatever other tailoring it does..."

And I see very personally how it now has the power to do "friendly censorship"... of course if you "know it exists" you can still with some effort see it, but "accessible reality" is shaped by google,and that is scary (well bing would be even scarier ...)

I didn't even realize taht Yahoo was a search engine, been so long since I was there.

As for censorship, I agree, it is scary, but I don't think that it conflicts with "Do no evil"?

I can't see how anyone could possibly build a search engine that does not have the side effect of imposing some level of censorship, deliberate or otherwise. It's a by product of the search algorithms.

If that effect is controlled and directed, (deliberate) it's evil. If it isn't, what can you do to lessen the inevitable side effect?

One answer is to use multiple search engines.

I'd like to be able to impose my own censorship on search results. I'm tired of getting search hits on experts sites that require you to log in or sign up (and possibly pay) to see what you were looking for.

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:Let Me Translate The Article For You...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree!

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

[drinkypoo]

Using the open source community as your free labor drones just feels wrong.

The programmers know how it works. They will let their behavior be dictated by the license; if they feel like it's a fair trade, they'll adopt the code.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to bee too xeniphobic, but it looks like they're already outsourcing to Bangalore? So having them further reduce costs as you suggest, actually seems in line with past behavoir.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Not providing a competitive advantage is very different than "being mostly useless". It means that Yahoo! would not be giving anything away to their competitors by open-sourcing it. The code is likely of some value to them or they wouldn't bother to open source it, they would just toss it out. This action seems similar to actions by Google, Facebook, and others--present the community with a useful piece of software that solved a problem that you have, like managing large data sets or rendering Web pages faster, but is not core to your business or a competitive advantage, to see if others can improve on it for you. I am sure Yahoo! engineers have encountered and solved numerous interesting problems over the years. If the open source community finds the code of value, Yahoo! will get the benefit of others' effort in maintaining and improving it, but it will be a 2-way street, b/c it means Yahoo! has contributed something of some initial value.

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The scaling technology sounds like it would help the open source community. Also as someone who works for them I can attest that there are some redundant systems that do the same things or are just fragmented from buying other technology and trying to integrate them. As the article says they're dropping hadoop for apache hadoop which would make sense for them to contribute back and forth on something more eyes are on.

As far as the MS thing, we let them handle the search tech for the web and shopping, less crap for us to deal with and their search is pretty good. Nobody here is sucking the MS teat that I know of (unless it's higher up the ladder or something).

My dept was going to be bought out by MS and we were all pissed but were happy w/ the proposed severance package which was very generous.

Anyone, you sound paranoid from my perspective as I type this out on my MBP.

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

[pyrr]

This is exactly what it comes down to. Yes, Yahoo! might be having some trouble extracting value from some of its stuff. But to make it open source, it's not getting "free labor". It's certainly going to have to give-up some of its exclusive ownership in order to get that labor. Personally, I think it's a great choice; far too many corporations would rather let their patents and other IP just rot when they lack the resources to properly develop them, so nobody benefits from them.

Hmm...

[lennier1]

Probably more complex than you'd think, since many of their products have been "bought together", like the eGroups system beneath their Yahoo Groups stuff, instead of being built on a common base.

Open source the keep-alive & buffering proxies

[Gopal.V]

I'm damn near to the point of writing something which does the same shit all over again - how to handle keep-alives and slow POSTs over indian IPs while not typing up apaches along with it.

I'd rather fix a few bugs in code that already works than write my own with blackjack and hookers.

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:releasing stuff

[MonsterTrimble]

Agreed. How would this be any different to a demolition company letting people come in and take away the building materials from a building they tore down for whatever project they desire? One person's trash is another's treasure.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You are calling for Open source support

[unity100]

despite your alliances and cooperation with microsoft ?

give me a break.

Re:You are calling for Open source support

[poetmatt]

everything I read pretty much confirms what I thought, that is a non-announcement basically.

Meanwhile, I agree that nobody would work with yahoo. Yahoo's on the way out, and it's their own decision to allow themselves to be controlled by MS and resultant failure.

Has anyone realized yet that working with microsoft directly taking payments basically means your company's going to go out of business?

Re:You are calling for Open source support

[Anonymous Coward]

The MS embrace, the kiss of Microsoft.

Web-based LibreOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great for the open-source community to find a partner in Yahoo. I would like to see if a web-based version of LibreOffice can be developed, including support for mobile devices, with Yahoo's support (GPL'ing and providing the back-end), that can be turned into an enterprise-ready application since it's going to be 100% open-sourced.

Yahoo can host their implementation for casual users and small businesses and make money that way. Large corporations, governments at all levels can easily switch to this as the data remains on-site and administration is a breeze while there still can be a small fraction of users with specific requirements that have a local LibreOffice installation.

Sun

[bsDaemon]

If Sun is anything to go by, this just seems like a signal that they're about to go under and are trying to throw all the extra weight off of the boat.

Re:Sun

[Tranzistors]

Extrapolation from one example? IBM open sources stuff and they are fine. Also, it could be that Sun went down not because of open sourcing, but because of hardware division losses. I haven't studied their finances though.

Re:Open source the keep-alive & buffering prox

[caternater]

Have you looked at http://trafficserver.apache.org/, which is Yahoo's frontend proxies that they open sourced and donated to the ASF a few ears ago? Pretty sure it does keepalive proxying.

Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[pecosdave]

They still haven't answered my somewhat trollish question about why they hate it either. Sorry, the whole "simple oversight" bit doesn't fly, it's been way too many years running the new mail system.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[ducomputergeek]

Repeat after me: Linux is a kernel not an OS.

It is very hard to do QA for "linux". You can do QA for RHEL or SLES or Ubuntu, but it's rather hard to do it for "linux" unless it's a patch to the kernel.

And the amount of time and cost to do QA for different Linux OS's as a consumer client isn't worth it if 95% + of your users are either on Windows or Mac. Especially since a lot of linux users like to "tweak" their installs. So your install of Ubuntu maybe very different from my install of SuSE. Much easier saying it *should* work, use at your own risk then trying to make it *work* with all 1000+ distros of linux

We do the same with our server software. It is guaranteed to work on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, RHEL and SLES. It *should* work with other linux distros, but we won't offer technical support if you call and are using Ubuntu and encounter a problem.

We also do the same thing for mobile applications. We give a QA guarantee for iOS 4.x and all devices running iOS 4.x as part of the contract, but only a QA guarantee for Android OS 2.2 running on the Nexus. We don't guarantee that any Android app we develop will work with any other version of Android OS or handset unless the client pays extra for each OS version and handset they want QA on. It was the only way to keep up with the costs of having a different version of android out 4 times a year and 2 - 4 new handsets a month.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[pecosdave]

Said like a true Yahoo! shill.

I know Linux is a kernel, however for just about everyone except for Richard Stallman himself it's acceptable to refer to GNU/Linux as Linux as it tends to confuse the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand the playing field when you actually say the "GNU" part.

The point I was making was that if the page is written properly it DOES NOT HAVE to be tested for any OS rendering about 80% of your argument moot.

Chances are if your page doesn't work with my browser it's you using crap code, not me using crap software.

I site the facts I can use Hulu, Facebook, Slashdot, Google Docs, and yes, even the Yahoo! mail that chastises me about my browser choice every time I log in without a hitch to back me up. The only things I haven't been able to use are corporate websites written in ancient versions of Front Page with massive heaping of Active-X and Microsoft proprietary "HTML". To be fair these websites don't work in newer versions of IE either and are in fact, crap code.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

The point I was making was that if the page is written properly it DOES NOT HAVE to be tested for any OS rendering about 80% of your argument moot.

Huh? If the page was written properly (and i'm not saying yahoo is or is not), and compliant to every open standard, it still does not mean you've tested it on every OS distribution.

From a corporate standpoint, you cannot and should not say some platform is supported, when you've not tested it. You can say "should probably work", but you shouldn't say "is supported" because your ass is on the line when somebody finds out something obscure that you never thought about doesn't work.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[FauxReal]

They will never answer your question because Y! Answers is answered by other Y! users and not some geek with an encyclopedia in one of their offices.

Yahoo! hates Linux so much that they run all their servers on FreeBSD, maybe you should switch to that OS. Also, I'm not sure why they have that message, some engineer was probably afraid of some weird javascript/ajax problem and having to deal with support requests. I know it's pretty complex in there and there are certain things like the Signature settings that won't work in Firefox and some other things I'm not exactly sure about that doesn't work in Chrome or Safari on OS X.

No idea why they malfunction in weird little ways.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[pecosdave]

So does that justify forcefully questioning my choice in OS every single time I chose to log in to their mail service? Isn't once enough?

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[pecosdave]

Granted, I don't code for the web as much as many people, but when I do I tend to stick with "safe" code, meaning code I know to work across the board. My biggest issues have usually been with IE, usually I'll code a page, run it against the W3C validator and tweak it until it passes, then test it. Usually when I do that it looks good on everything BUT certain versions of IE, in which case I have to go tweak the code further to make it look good on that also.

Other than IE being Windows specific the OS the individual browsers are working on is usually a moot point.

Most recently I run everything against a couple of Web Kit browsers and Firefox and call it good, I could give a rats ass about IE anymore, that being said newer versions are getting better.

Re:Yahoo! Hates Linux.

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Actually, it does kinda justify it. Because for every user who understands completely, many more won't really get it. Having a "don't show again" button would be much better for you and I, but maybe they decided it wasn't worth the time to implement. Or maybe they think that the common user would click it and not actually read the "hey, it's untested" message.

Some management guy probably decided this would help PR and/or support with handling problems with users who are not technical. For the non-techie, who's been handed an unsupported browser on an unsupported platform, it helps to remind them that any problems they experience can be fixed by using something that Yahoo has tested.

Keep in mind, you're taking their message as questioning your choice of OS. (and granted, I haven't read said message because I don't use said service) I expect them to simply state that you're running on an unsupported configuration, and that unexpected behavior might occur. It's the fine line between, "We didn't test it on your config" versus "We think your config sucks."

Now I kinda wonder what happens if I pull an old Mac LC475 out of the garage and try out Netscape 3...

So... everything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they the best at anything? Otherwise, I expect we'll have all of their source since none of it gives them a competitive advantage over anyone else.

git clone http://www.yahoo.com

interesting theory there :

[unity100]

Has anyone realized yet that working with microsoft directly taking payments basically means your company's going to go out of business?

Open source abandonware

[Animats]

Yes, this sounds like open source abandonware. That's not unusual; Google has done that a few times, too.

Yahoo Web hosting should be fixed

[Dystopian Rebel]

Does anyone here know if Yahoo hosting is still configured not to use a cgi-bin directory for CGI programs (Perl, Python)? I tried Yahoo hosting a while ago and they had it configured so the CGI programs would reside all over the server.

In any case, I found some inexpensive Linux-based hosting that lets me configure things the right way.

Re:Yahoo Web hosting should be fixed

[FauxReal]

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/perl/perl-03.html

Q: Where is my cgi-bin directory?

A: Yahoo! does not support or require a cgi-bin directory to run Perl scripts. You may place Perl scripts anywhere in your site directory structure. Be sure each script includes the file extension .pl or, if you are calling a Perl module, .pm. If your Perl script uses the extension .cgi, please rename it with the extension .pl..

Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, open source: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Translation:

[CAIMLAS]

Translation: we picked a (FreeBSD based) software stack years ago and stuck with it instead of moving to something better as they came along, because we'd made in-house modifications to the code base and not released them to the community. Now it's far behind the mainstream and we need help to stay competetive.

Re:Translation:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo's standard engineering stack is mostly Redhat and has been for years. Can you elaborate on these unreleased FreeBSD modifications?

BSE?

[Cyberax]

What does Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy has to do with HTTP?

Or do they have a new diagnostic technique?

Dear Yahoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about letting me mine your personals for free so I can find women in my zip code who want to bang?

Re:releasing stuff

[TaoPhoenix]

I'll take it one further.

It may not even be trash. It may be in that nebulous category of "unfocused". Geek Analogy! "The following lot contains: One thriller novel with a missing cover, a calculator with the % key missing, three boxes of green tea with a misprinted label, the source code for the Amiga OS, and a grass mud horse chia pet."