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..."

All the more reason.....

[by Anonymous Coward]

All the more reason why this deal should NOT go through....Anti-Competitive ? I think Microsoft would axe Zimbra in a heart beat.

Ok by me

[Hatta (162192)]

I'll be over here using Thunderbird/Icedove. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I used any Yahoo service or product. If Yahoo disappeared from the internet forever, I don't think I'd even notice. What does Yahoo even do that people find valuable anymore?

Who will I ping ?

[sodul (833177)]

ping yahoo.com

I don't know why but I always ping yahoo to troubleshoot my network connection. I guess I'll have to switch to ping 'google.com'

Re:

[apollosfire (954290)]

Get with the times, I switched to Google years ago! :P

two vast and trunkless legs of stone.com

[Stanistani (808333)]

Ping av.com - it's shorter to type, is always up, and is a useful reminder that you can have a dominant position in the search market one year, and be practically unused the next.

Re:two vast and trunkless legs of stone.com

[ATMD (986401)]

But still Yahoo, apparently:

nl@splig ~ $ hostx -A av.com
  !!! av.com address 66.94.234.13 maps to w2.rc.vip.scd.yahoo.com
  !!! av.com address 216.109.112.135 maps to w2.rc.vip.dcn.yahoo.com

So probably best not to get into the habit of pinging av.com, either...

P.S. Nice subject line :)

I'm not sure when you've checked

[Smeagel (682550)]

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

Re:Who will I ping ?

[houghi (78078)]

Better use tracert or traceroute instead of ping. That way you can not only see if your network connection is up, but also see what the problem is if it doesn't.

Re:Who will I ping ?

[PPH (736903)]

ping mouse-potato.com

Its always up and has very short round trip times.

Re:Who will I ping ?

[Stormwatch (703920)]

That's a good move. I don't recall slashdot ever being slashdotted.

Re:

[HankB (721727)]

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

Re:

[rbanffy (584143)]

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 (703920)]

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

Re:Who will I ping ?

[PrescriptionWarning (932687)]

"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:Ok by me

[neumayr (819083)]

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.

Re:Ok by me

[jmcbain (1233044)]

Yahoo finance.
Yahoo sports.
Yahoo news.
Yahoo movies.
Yahoo TV.
Yahoo weather.
Flickr (I don't use it though)
Delicious.
Yahoo Answers.
Yahoo maps.

Funny how these appeal to 500M unique visitors each month but not to you. I think it's because Yahoo targets a specific demographic, normal humans, rather than the the 30-year-old burnt-out techies on /. or the 19-year-old college students on Digg or the who-knows perverts on 4chan.

Re:Ok by me

[jaxtherat (1165473)]

rather than the the 30-year-old burnt-out techies on /. or the 19-year-old college students on Digg or the who-knows perverts on 4chan.

You say it like it's a bad thing...

Re:Ok by me

[dpninerSLASH (969464)]

Please forgive me if this reply is a bit off-topic.

Firstly, I don't believe GNU/Linux development will be seriously hindered. It's long since reached a tipping point past which any major disruptions are unlikely.

This might be a good time, however, for people to begin looking at some of the BSDs. Yes, I realize Yahoo! is a major BSD customer, and should this deal go through I can't see Microsoft permitting the existence of anything else on their servers. Still, the BSDs are also widely deployed, reliable, and many would argue that the BSD license is less encumbering. Also, it has a formal foundation and governance which effectively ensures it's survival.

I've been an open source user/administrator now for over 12 years (12 w/ Linux, 11 w/ BSD) and am surprised at the relatively low uptake for this family of operating systems. In short, Linux ain't the only game in town.

Re:

[nurb432 (527695)]

You may not directly use their 'services' but I think you would notice over time due to collateral damage to other seemingly untreated projects.

One more step towards eradication of that pesky OSS movement.

Re:

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

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

Roy Schestowitz, take with prescribed NaCl

[by 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:Roy Schestowitz, take with prescribed NaCl

[at_slashdot (674436)]

How about commenting the message not the person who brings it forth... does "ad hominem" sound like something you've heard before?

Re:

[muszek (882567)]

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.

Holy shit!

[by 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

Re:Holy shit!

[QuickFox (311231)]

He's been doing _at least_ 30 USENET posts a day, every day, for over two years.

...says Anonymous Coward, who makes more than 30 posts an hour.

Zimbra Admins

[Russianspi (1129469)]

Yeah, administrators of Zimbra based E-mail servers (like me) are starting to panic [zimbra.com] I think a Google bailout/business alliance could be, as one Zimbra developer described it, "manna from heaven".

Re:Zimbra Admins

[Dancindan84 (1056246)]

Quote from a Zimbra employee in that thread:

The OSS version of Zimbra is just that, Open Source. Whatever happens there should be no change in that status.

The joy of OSS is that if Microsoft/Yahoo discontinue support of Zimbra, someone else can pick it up. If there's a paid "corporate" version, I'm sure a company picking up would include support to migrate. I know that isn't ideal, but it isn't a reason for mass panic either.

Re:Zimbra Admins

[IGnatius T Foobar (4328)]

The OSS version of Zimbra is just that, Open Source. Whatever happens there should be no change in that status.

Unfortunately it's not true open source, as it has an obnoxious "badgeware" clause.

Zimbra users already seem to be sending out some feelers -- over at the Citadel [citadel.org] project we've had quite a surge of new interest from people who are either bailing out of Zimbra or simply evaluating what other options they might have when Microsoft shuts them down. Citadel is end-to-end GPL code so it is a true safety net.

Re:Zimbra Admins

[jimicus (737525)]

The joy of OSS is that if Microsoft/Yahoo discontinue support of Zimbra, someone else can pick it up. If there's a paid "corporate" version, I'm sure a company picking up would include support to migrate. I know that isn't ideal, but it isn't a reason for mass panic either.

To be fair, I don't know much about Zimbra, but many opensource projects (including some reasonably big ones) are only really well understood at a code level by a relatively small team of people.

If most or all of those people are employed by Yahoo, then even if someone else does pick up the Zimbra project this is a major setback.

Re:

[risk one (1013529)]

It might even be a good thing. These open/closed source combo's tend to have a very user-unfriendly open source version with plenty of annoyances, and a lovely smoothed out closed version. I don't know how they do it, but the open source devs never seem to focus on features that would make the closed version obsolete.

Now, if MS would force Zimbra to alienate the OS community (which they will by just attaching their name to it) the whole thing would get forked in a second into a pure open source project. G

Ok, so..

[PhrostyMcByte (589271)]

I don't understand how it would effect Linux (much less the GNU utilities), but it might slow down a few Y! projects. These projects, even if MS succeeds and stops all development on them, will still be continued if someone in the community thinks they are useful. That's the beauty of Open Source.

It's Official

[linumax (910946)]

BSD is dead, Roy Schestowitz confirms it!

Cathedral and the Bazaar

[tjstork (137384)]

So much for the cathedral and the bazaar.

Alas, as Linux has gotten bigger and more complex, it is also requiring more capital to sustain itself as well, and capital means corporate funding. How ironic that the bazaar has grown to becoming a sprawling, flopping, traffic jammed, flea market, and suddenly key parts of the bazaar are suspiciously looking rather cathedral like (FireFox, the kernel).

I predict that within a few years, Linux will grow to the point that its advocates will quietly abandon the collaborative, libertarian rhetoric that drove it early on, and instead turn more towards a quest for government funding along the lines of National Public Radio. It will continually seek corporate sponsorship, even as it decries their existence.

Re:Cathedral and the Bazaar

[multisync (218450)]

Alas, as Linux has gotten bigger and more complex, it is also requiring more capital to sustain itself as well, and capital means corporate funding ... I predict that within a few years, Linux will grow to the point that its advocates will quietly abandon the collaborative, libertarian rhetoric that drove it early on

I think it is great that we have the choice to go with a corporate-backed distro such as Red Hat or Novell if we need the support or enterprise features they offer, while still being able to choose a community-backed, "free" in every sense of the word distro like Debian if that is what suits us. The very existence of choice is the success of free and open source software.

I predict that the bazaar will continue to grow and expand and cater to all kinds of needs and tastes in the future. That really is the benefit of FOSS, isn't it? The freedom to choose (and use) the software that suits our needs, rather than being forced to take what the silo masters are pushing.

Re:

[tjstork (137384)]

I predict that the bazaar will continue to grow and expand and cater to all kinds of needs and tastes in the future. That really is the benefit of FOSS, isn't it? The freedom to choose (and use) the software that suits our needs, rather than being forced to take what the silo masters are pushing.

Well I think its super, actually. I think some people can confuse FOSS with anti-corporatism, and certainly, there's those that would and on both sides of the boring old aisle. But I think really that the whole th

Re:Cathedral and the Bazaar

[Per Abrahamsen (1397)]

How ironic that the bazaar has grown to becoming a sprawling, flopping, traffic jammed, flea market,

You have never been to bazaar, have you?

del.icio.us Bookmarks

[kc2keo (694222)]

Should M$ aquire Yahoo! I sure hope my del.icio.us bookmarks will still be up and running. If so they better still work in FF/WindowsXP or FF/Kubuntu->Linux. Otherwise I'll just use the local FireFox bookmarks again. Backed up my bookmarks just in case... That would be a pretty big downer for my bookmarks to vanish or just stop working across different platforms...

Re:

[TeamSPAM (166583)]

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.

Microsoft 2.0

[writerjosh (862522)]

Microsoft's only options are to either open up widely to Open Source, or to crush Google with its proprietary products - which will never happen. This only leaves Microsoft one option: encourage/use Open Source or die. They're simply too far in the hole and their products are rapidly becoming obsolete from the POV of the average-Joe user.

Absorbing Yahoo is going to be a mammoth task simply because of internal cultural differences, but trying to fight the tide of Open Source is a losing battle for Microsoft.

Re:

[samkass (174571)]

Not that I don't often find open source valuable and useful, but I don't see the trends you're talking about. There are very few open source products that are winning and/or dominant over their proprietary rivals. Google certainly has not gotten much adoption of their enterprise software-- they're still basically an advertising company. If Microsoft would accept that, and accept that Microsoft is NOT an advertising company, they could probably live together reasonably well.

Re:Microsoft 2.0

[molarmass192 (608071)]

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:Microsoft 2.0

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

Open Standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, iCal
Open Source: Apache, Tomcat, Linux (been in a server room lately?), MySQL, Perl, Python, Ruby, Rails, GNU Compiler Collection, Vim, Emacs, Netbeans, Solaris, Java, Glassfish, Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, OpenLDAP, ISC Bind.

Look at all those loser applications. Give me a couple more minutes I might think of some more.

Maybe you're stuck in an anachronistic office suite kind of existence, but few folks I know could care less about creating gratuitously formatted meeting minutes.

I'm all for freedom, including your freedom to keep feeding your money to companies who do little more than capriciously alter their file formats and protocols on a semi-annual basis to compel otherwise useless upgrades. Of course, some folks just like to spend money to have shiny objects too. Fine with me, I do the same thing sometimes. Just remember, in a free market, victory goes to the most efficient and productive; and wasting money on services and software that have been commoditized is a loser.

(Off Topic) New Microsoft story icon submission

[Robber Baron (112304)]

With the impending departure of Bill Gates, I think a new Microsoft story icon is in order.
For that I don't think we need to go much further than the picture at the top of this story...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/yahoo-bid-bad-news-for-the-net-says-google/2008/02/04/1201973796947.html [smh.com.au]

10 minutes to fork both Zimbra & YUI

[Qbertino (265505)]

From what I can tell skimming the YPL it takes nothing more than setting up a Sourceforge Project to fork each of these products. It was only a few years ago when Push&Pull JavaScript and a few guys competing with Exchange with a Web ASP were nothing but a handfull of nutcases.
Apart from the corporate fuled buzz Yahoo is putting behind YUI and the consited branding of Zimbra there is absolutely nothing for FOSS to lose with this MS-Yahoo deal. On the contrary. We're watching the evil empire blowing ca. 50 billion on a pipe dream about going head-to-head with Google in search. That's fine with me.

Re:10 minutes to fork both Zimbra & YUI

[ColdWetDog (752185)]

10 minutes to fork it and then a lifetime to maintain and develop it.

People always forget about the second part...

Just like sex. People forget about the second part for a while, then little problems creep up. Then the problems get bigger.

Then you're screwed.

Not really sure where I'm going with this one, but it's a scary thought.

Many things would be affected

[kbahey (102895)]

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 (13932)]

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...

It gets worse

[WindBourne (631190)]

MS currently has 10% of the market share of the search engines. Yahoo has about 1/3. Google has about 50% or more. If MS aquires Yahoo, they will convert it instantly to being live.com and will exclude all Linux systems. My guess is that sites that use apache will slowly see their searches be pushed back further and further in the MS engine. IOW, this is designed not to just take on Google, but to move companies off of Apache as well as punish all those that are not using Windows.

And to think that just recently MS was released from Federal oversight. All of this makes a good case for either FTC to step in or for either IBM or even Sun to purchase Yahoo. Otherwise, those companies will see *nix take a HUGE hit on the net. For IBM it will hurt a bit, but for Sun, it will destroy them.

Re:

[hellsDisciple (889830)]

The dark horse in this whole affair is Sun, not Apple. Sun has a very solid hardware and software business, and now has MySQL under its belt. It pretty much has zero real presence in the provision of online services. Sun essentially would get a shrink-wrapped business which takes care of itself and has very little redundant services. There is little political baggage with such a purchase either. They also get a platform to market their products virally (powered by Sun).

FreeBSD would probably fare OK in that

Be quiet everyone. Let Microsoft buy Yahoo.

[Otehake (1089281)]

Most people have been aware of the large Microsoft warchest of billions with which they have been known to squash competition. Hence, one of the best ways to peg back Microsoft a few notches (and become less of a monopoly), is for them to lose some of this warchest. Watch as Microsoft spend the bulk of their warchest on Yahoo, influence Yahoo with their Microsoft leadership and business styles, people run away from such dictatorial practices, and Yahoo diminish in value until there is little value attached to the brand.

Poof! Billions of Microsoft dollars gone up in smoke. So sssssshhhh... don't tell them they are making a very big mistake. Perhaps then they will start competing on valuable software and services.