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.)"

Re:Tax Break?

[explosivejared]

WP [wikipedia.org] 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.

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 [apache.org], where google is also listed as a platinum donor

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 [apache.org].

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 [apache.org].

Re:Tax Break?

[jaaron]

We have incorporated. Please see my other comment [slashdot.org]. Apache is a legal US charity.

Google is also an Apache Sponsor

[jaaron]

Google is also an Apache platinum sponsor. [apache.org] 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...

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: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:Go Yahoo

[wannabgeek]

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

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.

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.

Re:Truly do no evil?

[BeanThere]

Yup, and Yahoo never collaborates unethically with the Chinese government [nytimes.com]. 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.