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Yahoo Becomes Apache Platinum Sponsor

Posted by kdawson on Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:08 PM
from the confluence-of-interests dept.
Businesses The Internet Yahoo! Software The Almighty Buck Apache
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.)"
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Submission: Yahoo! becomes Platinum Sponsor of Apache Software by jschauma (90259)
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  • Tax Break? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ookabooka (731013) on Sunday December 16 2007, @10:12PM (#21722114)
    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.

  • Go Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cumin (1141433) on Sunday December 16 2007, @10:14PM (#21722126)

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Temporal (96070) on Monday December 17 2007, @12:14AM (#21722738) Journal
      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.
    • 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,
      • well I'm still complaining about how they crippled Geocities. They crippled the access to try to bleed money out of the community, then after they destroyed the community they stopped caring, and made their ads more intrusive. If they opened it up again it could still be a useful service, but it has been bypassed by the blogging generation.
  • Is it just me, or is Yahoo really what Google purports to be these days?

    Mmmmmm....
  • I hope Yahoo taking an interest in Lucene involves them making heavy improvements to it. Wikipedia's search is the worst.
    • I find myself just using google to search inside of wikipedia.org instead of using the actual wikipedia search. It really is quite bad.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Titoxd (1116095)
        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 datab

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by 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.

        • Parent is WRONG, not "Insightful". (Score:4, Informative)

          by Eivind Eklund (5161) on Monday December 17 2007, @03:01AM (#21723308) Journal
          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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by vhogemann (797994)
          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.

    • I was surprised to hear they used Lucene.. I don't think Lucene is bad, I've checked it out and it has a nice feature set (as well as being robust), but Wikipedia's search is awful.

      This whole thing is also interesting from the Google Knol vs Wikipedia angle.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by otisg (92803)
      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/ [sematext.com] and
    • Wikipedia's search may or may not be terrible (I've never had any problems..) but I doubt it's Lucene's fault. I've written a pylucene-based application, and I found the search results to be outstanding.

      That said, Lucene really does need lots of help. It's terrible to compile, the bindings leave something to be desired, it seems to be a resource hog and it needs built-in numeric range search ("find me all typewriters costing more than $100 and less than $400").

      I hope Yahoo! is actually interested in helpi
    • Wikipedia's search is bad because the implementation blows. It not Lucene's fault, it's the fault of the mediawiki devs. Lucene has implementations ready for every kind of search improvement trick you can think of. Simple example, you can boost the importance of different fields. Mediawiki could easily boost the influence of the title field, but I'm pretty sure that they don't. When I search for UDP, the first hit is about UDP ports, the second is the disambiguation page for UDP. Lucene allows for all sorts
      • Are you sure it's Lucene and not Wikipedia's use or Lucene? (I never use Wikipedia's internal search, so I really don't know)

        Did you know that Amazon uses Lucene for "search inside the book", for example? Does that suck, too?

  • Google donates too (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dashcolon (946284) on Sunday December 16 2007, @10:58PM (#21722390)
    All you gents lauding Yahoo for being a platinum donor in comparisons to Google should take a look at Apache's donation thanks page [apache.org], where google is also listed as a platinum donor

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by linguizic (806996)
      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.
  • I guess this puts Microsoft and Yahoo further apart. Not too long ago, it was speculated that Microsoft would make a move to buy Yahoo. Now Yahoo's sponsoring .NET's biggest competitor.

  • Wikipedia, eh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frosty Piss (770223) on Monday December 17 2007, @12:02AM (#21722702)

    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...
    • The reason I still generally use WP's search function is the fact that it will take you directly to the article if you get the title correct, and to the results otherwise; quite useful in conjunction with smart keywords, where I can type wp Penguin to get directly at that article. This can be approximated with google's browse by name and I'm feeling lucky functions like:

      http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=site:en.wikipedia.org %s

      and

      http://www.googl

  • 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

    • One of the theories of why violent crime spiked in the late '80s

      Well, you can have all kinds of theories about anything, I guess.

      Violent crime in the USA was increasing from around 1910 onward, until around 1990, then it began to decrease.

      The rapid decrease in inner city crime since around 1990 correlates well with the increased use of cell phones in these areas. This is probably causal rather than coincidental. The combination of cell phones and rapid response to 911 calls appears to be an effective deterrent to assaults, robberies, breaking and entering, and oth

  • I work on their servers, they all run either FreeBSD or RedHat. (FYI those were the only choices as of a year ago in PXE reimage boots) Its not like they have many robust other hosting choices

    Its good that they are support Apache, but really, they should of just did a joint statment with Goggle when they signed on. Sounds to much like a one-up manship.
  • The Wikipedia search sucks. It's case sensitive (but not always), doesn't use word stems (though it seems to sometimes), and has other inconsistent results that mix lexical and semantic matches with underwhelming effectiveness.

    Now Yahoo wants the same "quality"? Their creating their most successful competitor in Google has really maimed their senses over there.
    • 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 [openclipartlibrary.org] earlier this year, but I really need to send a Christmas present to the guys at Inkscape. This story's a good reminder.

      - Greg
      • Good point, I couldn't afford to donate to every project I use, but I do try to give $10 here and $20 there to the projects that I think are useful. I call it "microfunding".
      • Correct, more people should donate, especially to software they use (of course it has to be said that the greatest donation is your time in writing code). I am trying to bootstrap a project (AlgoLibre [algolibre.org]) modelled after philanthropy giving circles to enable people donate services (eg free email, web space, svn, cvs etc) to free software developers (the idea is, whoever manages Internet servers to take a small slice of each server, VPS or not, and give it gratis for use by free software developers, then my ide
        • I want to know if this stuff is tax deductible? If so, how can I prove it? Working as a consultant I wouldn't mind at all donating a tax deductible portion of my services back to the vendor of the software I use.
          • If it's registered as a US-based non-profit then absolutely. The easiest way to keep "proof" would be to just mail them a check and keep a copy of the canceled check. It's not as easy for the non-prof as an online donation, but it'd probably be the best way to show proof of your donation.

            Otherwise, I'd just print-out whatever receipt you get after donating, and maybe a copy of your CC statement showing the transaction.

            I've never been audited, but this is what my CPA has told me. canceled checks are best, bu
    • I'm still waiting them to go all the way and add local photo album support to it. Looks like they're getting there. I really need to be able to organize stuff offline a-la picasa, only with an easy to upload interface. Kind of like the api they added to picasa for smugmug.

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