gg said, 04/19/2006:

Yahoo! and Open Source.

This case study may be interesting to include in a book due to the fact that it involves a fairly large internet giant Yahoo! and its use and release of open source code.

The first time I heard of this was a few months ago when a friend of mine, an employee of Yahoo! Casually mentioned an open source project that was recently released to the public and was gaining a great deal of pr recognition for Yahoo!

To my understanding this software was developed at Yahoo! in order to be used as a way of communication for people within the company.  It had been used internally for awhile and was then released for public use.

Yahoo! wanted to find software to meet their needs, and unable to find it, they developed their own system to support the internal functions.

  “Yahoo uses open-source software and development tools to build and support the services that customers have come to love about the company, such as E-mail, music, and search. About a dozen of Yahoo's Web-page templating systems were designed using the PHP programming language and help define how Web pages will look.”

 Jeremy Zawodny, a member of Yahoo's technology development team states that one of the “biggest challenges for open-source users is licensing.”

Source: (http://www.serverpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=171204503)      

Google and Open Source

Another internet giant, Google has also recently launched open source code for developers,                              It is interesting to note that like Yahoo, Google is also built on open source technology.

“Code for four debugging or optimization tools is available: CoreDumper, for creating core dumps of a running program without terminating it; Sparse Hashtable contains hash-map (define) implementations; Goopy/Functional, is a library for Python, the open-source object-oriented programming language; and Perftools can be used to make C++ applications more robust.”  Source: (http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3491026)

It seems as if this trend of open source is being used as a public relations and marketing gimmick for these companies.  It in essence works to draw interest.

“The code posted isn't exactly central to Google, according to Mike Sax, president of Sax Software, a development shop. They're more of a little handout to generate some interest," Sax said.  (Source: (http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3491026)