How Microsoft-Yahoo Will Affect Open Source

jammag writes "If the marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo were to be consummated, GNU/Linux would be hindered, argues Roy Schestowitz. Yahoo's funding of open source initiatives would dry up. Yahoo, which acquired Zimbra, would lose its love for the open source competitor of Microsoft Outlook. The list goes on..."

Roy Schestowitz, take with prescribed NaCl

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I understand why this person's opinions are even relevant (obviously the submitter runs the site where this piece was published and needs the ad revenue, not that any normal person would bother submitting something like this to Slashdot). "...argues Roy Schestowitz"? As in "pursuant to the previous insightful and established opinion we've all come to expect from Roy Schestowitz"? Please.

Roy Schestowitz is a non-entity who spends 18 hours a day crapflooding USENET [google.com] (just page back and see who posts there), Digg, Propeller and any number of social bookmarking and discussion websites. This, aside from running who knows how many attack blogs that target Novell, Xandros, Linspire and many others beg the question of whether this is just a lonely poor student with no life whatsoever or a very organized group of people with some serious corporate backing.

Anyone deranged enough to post things like [digg.com] these [digg.com] should be, in my opinion, permanently ignored. The Microsoft-Yahoo merger needs to be analyzed from many angles by people who know what they're talking about, not by paid drones who regurgitate what they read in other blogs and are trying to make a name for themselves by disrupting communities to push their agendas.

Re:Ok by me

[neumayr]

There's this little photo sharing site... flickr I think it's called.
Heard it's still pretty popular.
And a social bookmarking site, del.icio.us.

Holy shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were kidding about crap-flooding. This is his Google stats card:

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2006 155 407 917 368 1240 1611 1731 1860 1979 1395 1705 1781
2007 2100 1910 2104 1847 1844 1430 1664 1462 1301 1034 1032 1038
2008 1215

1000 posts a month is about thirty a day. He's been doing _at least_ 30 USENET posts a day, every day, for over two years.

Many things would be affected

[kbahey]

There are many implications for the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo merger [baheyeldin.com] for open source.

Microsoft will not continue to run on an open source platform, like they did with Hotmail.

- PHP: heavily used in Yahoo. Yahoo employs PHP founder and project lead Rasmus Lerdorf.
- Apache: Yahoo uses Apache heavily, and has many patches and modules for it. IIS will replace it.
- MySQL: likewise, they use it heavily. Expect MS-SQL in there.
- FreeBSD and Linux: they use them a lot. Expect those to be turfed for Windows.
- Yahoo YUI javascript library.

Yahoo also hosts open source events (e.g. OSCMS: Open Source Content Management Systems back in March 2007).

All the sponsorship money, paying salaries for open source leads, ...etc. will end.

This is not good news at all.

What a bad article

[Asmodai]

This guy quotes how Yahoo takes pride in running FreeBSD...

Running? Yahoo! is one of the largest infrastructure sponsors of the FreeBSD project and last time I checked even had people employed that are committers on the project. So yes, any take over of Yahoo! by Microsoft will no doubt put a huge dent into the FreeBSD Project's infrastructure that cannot easily be replaced in my opinion. So it's not just about running...

Re:Ok by me

[gEvil (beta)]

Yahoo doesn't own Digg. How does crap like this get modded up?

Re:del.icio.us Bookmarks

[TeamSPAM]

Well, you do have the option to export your bookmarks from del.icio.us. I do it on a regular basis as I have some perl script to work with the data. The bookmarks are yours, just make sure you have a backup if your access to it goes away.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Who will I ping ?

[PrescriptionWarning]

"The only thing I use Yahoo for is a junk email account that I give away liberally when an email address is required."

i've started using the 10 minute email [10minutemail.com] instead of yahoo for junk, works wonders :)

Re:Microsoft 2.0

[molarmass192]

There are very few open source products that are winning and/or dominant over their proprietary rivals.

Depends on your definition of "few". Apache, Eclipse, Linux, FreeBSD (as OS X), and Firefox are all winning (ie. increasing market share) or dominant (Apache / Eclipse) over their proprietary rivals. Other major open source products that have a marked impact on their segments include GCC, Tomcat, CVS, Subversion, Bugzilla, Struts, Hibernate, JBoss, MySQL, SQLite, and VLC.

Re:Roy Schestowitz, take with prescribed NaCl

[muszek]

It's no different than Rob Weir (a full-time salaried employee of IBM) commenting on OOXML. Whatever he has to say is tainted by the fact that his employer has products that compete with the ones he spends most of his work hours slamming.

The fact that out of all FUD that's been spread over the years in the IT world you've chosen this outrageous example (ya know, the one where evil forces prevent innocent geniuses from bringing innovation to the World) says a lot, mate.

Re:Who will I ping ?

[HankB]

Some pages on /. have come up 503 earlier today. So while it probably replies to a ping, it might have been slashdotted.

Re:Roy Schestowitz, take with prescribed NaCl

[Anonymous Coward]

I just looked at his homepage. This guy is a total douche in my opinion. Standard internet narcissist:

I am an active member of Sourceforge and Freshmeat, a popular author in MATLAB Central and a part of The Computer Ring. I am heavily involved in UseNet (see archive) as well as various technical groups. Occasionally I moderate in Slashdot, continously promoting the use of GNU/Linux as a main-stream operating system. I am committed to extending state-of-the-art technologies (confer projects & utilities) and I have been serving the Web since I was 15.

He moderates slashdot! Amazing. Clueless people should be ignored, although his website is amusingly awful: http://schestowitz.com/ [schestowitz.com]

Re:Who will I ping ?

[rbanffy]

Slashdot is, by definition, slashdotted all the time.

What is different from most sites that get slashdotted is that it can withstand the load.

Re:Who will I ping ?

[Stormwatch]

No... by definition, "slashdotting" is an influx of traffic from Slashdot to a server that can not handle it.

I'm not sure when you've checked

[Smeagel]

But I've been pinging google.com for years and it has never blocked them.