Wikia Acquires Grub, Releases it Under Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "During a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available for download and testing."

FIST SPORT

Oh fuck! Does this mean I have to read [Citation Needed] every time I boot up?

Re:FIST SPORT

Not the bootloader

Re:FIST SPORT

How do you expect him to get first post if he reads the summary?

Meh...

Real mean use Lilo. Oh, wait...nevermind.

Lunch Time

That's funny, I ALSO just acquired some grub, yum yum.

Release

Yes, but in what form are you planning to release it?

Re:Release

Binary blob.

Re:Release

It will be released as public domain, delivery will be as a Fast Universal Dump and Gas Exchange (fudge) packet [1] over a Wireless Connection (WC) with a water protocol to a local STP node (sewage treatment plant). At the STP node it will be processed for redistribution.

[1] including several pamphlet with Rorschach-like art.

Uh-oh?

This might be bad news for Google. WP is about the only "organization" capable of putting together a human-vetted search with the Grub software. I have no idea of people will go for that sort of thing (I like my search results from an algorithm, thanks) but if they do, and the search results work correctly (that relevance is what made Google to begin with) then Google might just be in trouble.

Of course at that point Google will buy Wikia and whatever other properties seem relevant... and then Google will have completed the transition from "do no evil" to "if you can't beat them, buy them" that started with YouTube.

Of course this might not be the case, but I have trouble trying to come up with a reason why Wikia might want something like Grub.

So?

It's a nice idea, but badly implemented. Search doesn't even work (I've tried it before, and it's never worked), and on top of that, today, search throws a bunch of mySQL errors (mySQL? for a search engine?!?!). It's a nice idea, and maybe this group will breathe some life into it, but right now, grub is doa, as far as I'm concerned.

\ I'll be excited if they make a working search engine. I'll be even more excited if they do work on the searching algorithms, which is what makes or breaks search engines, not the amount of content they have. It's what you do with the info. Anybody can spider lots and lots of information. Providing relevant results is why Google is #1 now, and those results are the results of some heavy, heavy math that is done by lots of pHD's. Spidering, which seems to be the focus of Grub, isn't a big limitation for most search engines these days.

Plans for BOINC?

I wonder if they have any plans to be part of the BOINC project [berkeley.edu]. After being a seti@home user for several years, then finally following it over to BOINC, I can't help but think of BOINC every time I hear something about distributed computing.

I know BOINC isn't the end-all-be-all of distributed computing, but it seems they gathered a large following once Seti@home project moved there, especially with what I would newbies or laymen to distributed computing in general. It might seem a smart move considering the variety of projects they already have along with their current userbase.

wait a second

WIKIA is a for profit company!

so they want to use other peoples spare CPU cycles to build an empire on top without spending money on servers?

rofl!

all them spare cpu cycles would be better used for distributed research like Folding@Home and other @home projects

Re:wait a second

I use Google search, which is produced by Google Inc., a for-profit company. I use the search "for free," but then again I "pay" with my eyeballs, since the search pages have ads. This is a trade-off that I (and many others) are willing to make.

So why is it so crazy to think that users would be willing to participate in a search engine where you "pay" with your spare CPU cycles? If the search engine generates useful results, it seems like a fair trade-off for me.

I'm not sure what Wikia's business model is here. It's probably not ads, since it would be difficult to reliably enforce and bill an ad-pushing system using software that is open-source and a network that is peer-to-peer. Probably they hope that this will drive more traffic to Wikia projects, or somesuch.

But, ultimately, I don't see what's so crazy about a for-profit company and end users coming to a mutually beneficial agreement. I donate CPU cycles and bandwidth, and get access to search results. Sounds fair to me. If the result is useful and the terms-of-use not onerous, most users will happily use it.

Re:wait a second

Wikia is the for-profit arm of Wikimedia. A large amount of Wikia profits help cover Wikimedia costs, and I'm pretty sure Wikia pays a Mediawiki developer. It also pays the salaries of some people who spend a lot of time administering Wikimedia, including Jimbo Wales and Angela Beesley.

There are way too many uses of "wiki" in that paragraph...

Anyhow, my point is that while it's a for-profit, it's still "for the public good" in a sense, since it exists to support non-profits, and thus it's not crazy to donate them CPU cycles.

Interesting

I just loaded this new grub on my system. I got a strange new boot menu:

1. Fedora Core 7 (redirected from Red Hat)
   [Note: This selection may be too technical for the average user. Please help revise to improve.]
2. Microsoft Windows Vista (redirected from Longhorn)
   [Note: This entry has been locked from new and anonymous users due to ongoing controversy. See also: WGA]
3. Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (redirected from Win98)
   [Note: This OS requires cleanup to conform to quality standards. Please get involved.]
4. FreeBSD 6.2
   [Note: Link appears dead. This has been tagged since July, 2007]
5. MSDOS 5.11(redirected from DOS)
   [This operating system is a stub. Please help to expand and improve it. This entry has been tagged since 1981]

Use the up and down arrow keys to make a selection, press Enter to boot.

Is this a good thing?

Wikia is a for-profit company. Users running portions of their crawler should be paid. At least in stock of the company. Otherwise it's a ripoff. It's reminiscent of Kazaa's approach to "peer to peer": user machines do the work; Kazaa collects the money.

Distributing the web crawl isn't that big a win. The crawl is a batch job, but replying to search requests is a near real time application. The expensive part of a search engine is the system that generates fast search responses. That's where you need the systems with gigabytes of RAM and tight coupling to the other machines of the cluster.

Doing the web crawl on user machines offloads some of the effort, but not all that much of it. If you want to cut crawl costs, some of the query machines can be devoted to crawling during slow periods.

Remember, you can't trust the client. Web spammers can modify their copies of the crawler to report extra, phony links to their web sites and boost their stats. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "link farming". Until Wikia, there was no easy way for "search engine optimization" types to mess with the internals of the search engine. Now there is.

Besides, what's the selling point? "Our search costs less to use than Google?" Hello?

Re:Is this a good thing?

kquote>Comparing Kazaa to Wikia is rather over the top as Wikia doesn't install spyware and ad-serving crap. A bit of FUD?

That's not the part the parent is comparing. The parent's comparison has NOTHING to do with the spyware issue. It has to do with using the "communities" resources to make money without paying for those resources. But hey, if *you* like to work for free, have at it.

I, for one, welcome our new Wiki overlords

Oh, great, so we get to extend the now-infamous Wiki popularity club to searches.

Translated Press Release

FTFA:

Wikia has aquired the Grub sourcecode from LookSmart. We will be posting the complete, current codebase as soon as possible, here on Grub.org. In the meantime, signup and stay tuned to developments regarding getting Grub going again.

Translation: Development had slowed to a SNAIL's pace(*), but now casting off its SHELL, we bring you a new and improved (TM) GRUB!

(*) From: Member Statistics [grub.org] (as of 20070730 at 14:47 EDT)

Members Overview (see all)
Total members: 1,049
Oldest member: 14,016 days
Active this month: 2

Let's see here:

dc --expression="2k 14016 365.25 / f"

38.3737 YEARS!

Celebrity Deathmatch!

I hope they are successful so I can witness a fair fight to the death between man (Wikia) and machine (Google). My bet is machine.

Compared to others?

How does this compare to http://www.yacy.net/yacy/ [yacy.net] ?

Welcome Back Grubby

I'm the guy that started Grub back in 1999. In 2003, after getting a little bit of press, I sold the company to LookSmart. I was hoping for a continuation of the OS license for Grub, and the financial backing of a larger company that could help develop the product out to it's logical conclusion - distributed, open search.

Unfortunately that didn't happen with the situation, and I decided to move on to other opportunities. Now here I am again, and I fully support what Wikia is doing with Grub, and what their resources can do for the project and the problem it can solve.

Myself (Kord Campbell), Igor Stojanovski and Ledio Ago (both who work at Splunk BTW) are three original founders of Grub. We are now helping Wikia out with getting it up and running, and explaining how things work (or don't) and will continue spending a bit of time helping out where we can as the project matures.

I would like to point out that Grub itself isn't all that interesting right now. About all it does is distribute jobs that consist of URLs to crawl. Yes, something similar could be done with BOINK. Yes, nothing is being done with the crawled data. Yes, it breaks occasionally and it's full of bugs.

However, it's a start. It's the first pass at fully distributing the job of search, and putting it where it belongs - in the commons. Search doesn't belong to Google, or Wikia, it belongs to everyone. It's your data, and it should be your search engine crawling, indexing and searching that data - not some monolithic profit hungry company.

Go and read the page on search over at Wikia: http://search.wikia.com/ [wikia.com] - Jer Miller (worked on Jabber) explains what they have in mind for Atlas. It's a fully distributed, OS, open protocol dream of making better search. Like Wikipedia (which is non-profit), Jimmy Wales wants search to be open, and community driven/managed - it's not about making gobs of money off your CPU/Bandwidth - it's about making better search for everyone.

Ideally the current Grub clients/server will go away, and be replaced with something better. For now, you have to crawl before you walk, and you have to walk before you run. Given time, and support from the OS community, I'm sure Wikia will do the right thing here.

If you want to get involved and help out, start by hitting the wiki and contributing your thoughts. We are going to need coders working on different aspects of the project as well, so think about volunteering in your particular area of expertise.

Great

I wonder if Wikia will have controls over their search terms? What will "Wikipedia admin real name" turn up?

Is it worth it to you?

Using "spare" computer cycles costs money. Hook up a power meter to your computer and check it out. My computer uses more than 50 extra watts during computation intensive tasks (not even graphics) than when the processor is idle. At 20 hours a day of extra processing cycles (if you would normally have your computer on but processor idle during those times) at 10 cents per kilowatt hour would be just about 10 cents per day, or $3 a month added to your electric bill. It would probably be more efficient for people to donate that money to Wikia so they can buy their own efficient servers, mine wastes a lot of energy on the power supply and hard drives for instance. The bandwidth might count for something also, but there are extra trips to deliver information back to Wikia also...

Wow, that's confusing.

Given that Grub is Gnu-branded, and Debian installs it *by default*, I was practically certain that it was open-source already (though I don't happen to actually _know_ which license, though since it's Gnu-branded I bet I could venture a guess...) and maintained by the FSF. Now here we have Wikia acquiring Grub and releasing it under an open-source license. Must be a different Grub, but that still leaves room for lots of confusion.

What I want to know is, will Grub be released under the *same* open-source license as is used for Grub, or a different one? I could just about break out into an Abbott and Costello parody with this question...

boot loader

Grub is a boot loader not a search tool...
You've got your wires crossed again...