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

Messenger

[MonsterTrimble]

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

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

[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

[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.

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]

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...

[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.

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.