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.)"

Go Yahoo

[cumin]

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:Tax Break?

[gbulmash]

If you can justify that you got something of value for it, you can deduct it as a business expense, which is as good as a charitable donation, when it comes to its impact on their taxes. I'd guess Yahoo! would classify it as a PR expense, but they might also classify it as R&D. Depends on what their tax lawyers say to classify it as.

- Greg

Truly do no evil?

[Veroxii]

Is it just me, or is Yahoo really what Google purports to be these days?

Mmmmmm....

If Everyone

[gbulmash]

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

Re:Lucene and Wikipedia

[Titoxd]

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 databases are required for that. So, there is an expensive replication task from the text table to the search tables in MediaWiki.

So now Chinese blood money

[Anonymous Coward]

is being used to support FOSS. So what. ALL money is blood money nowadays :-(

Re:Go Yahoo (Their webhosting still sucks)

[Z80xxc!]

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, dumbed-down interface is so annoying that working from a computer without ftp access is excruciating. So, yes this is a step in the right direction, but their web hosting services still leave much to be desired.

Re:Go Yahoo

[Yetihehe]

I like clean start pages too. So I'm using this [about]

Re:Google donates too

[linguizic]

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.