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."

Re:FIST SPORT

[Archangel Michael]

Not the bootloader

Re:wait a second

[ZachPruckowski]

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.

it is not the for-profit arm of Wikimedia

[Trepidity]

They are completely separate entities. The only relationship is that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, started this venture with Angela Beesley, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors.

There is some synergy, partly because of the fact that Jimmy Wales runs Wikia and sort-of runs Wikimedia, partly because Wikia needs community goodwill to succeed, and partly because Wikia uses the MediaWiki software on its own servers so has an interest in it working well. However it isn't anywhere near as close a relationship as you described.

Welcome Back Grubby

[zokord]

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.

Re:Compared to others?

[TeknoHog]

This Grub seems to be a human-edited system not unlike Wikipedia. I'm much more interested in algorithmic search, which is why your YaCy link was most welcome :) Another distributed search I've come across is Majestic-12 [majestic12.co.uk].

Re:FIST SPORT

[MoxFulder]

I wish someone would acquire the GRUB, and close it. That piece of crap has caused me more pain than any other open source software. If lilo broke, well just grab a boot disk and rerun it. When (not if) grub breaks, god help you trying to figure out what to do.

Are you kidding me? On most Linux systems, you can just run update-grub to reinstall the first-stage bootloader (or grub-install on some). To adjust its settings, you need only edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst ... you don't even have to re-run GRUB after editing that file.

Unlike Lilo, GRUB offers a full-featured command line so that you can edit your boot settings if it doesn't quite work right. No need for a rescue disk almost ever. GRUB reads it configuration file at boot time, unlike LILO which hides it somewhere after the boot sector of the hard disk.

GRUB is very powerful, it can boot off USB drives in a sane way, it can work around all kinds of BIOS bugs, etc. And in my opinion it's easier-to-use than LILO as well! It sounds like you only have trouble with GRUB because you never bothered to learn the one or two commands needed to reinstall it :-) Since I switched from LILO to GRUB, the *only* times I've ever needed to reinstall GRUB are when I install Windows on top of Linux, and it hoses my boot sector. And I lay the blame for that squarely on Microsoft...

I admit, grub is nice when it automagically works. The problem is when it doesn't. GRUB failures are the only reason I reinstall operating systems anymore.

Well, sure... *any* bootloader is great when it "just works." It's when it doesn't quite boot right that you start to care about it. And that's why GRUB's command line and other features are so great.

For many of us, the bootloader is just a solution to the fact that the PC BIOS is horribly retarded, and no self-respecting operating system kernel includes the kind of awful code needed to interface with the BIOS. If we could all use LinuxBIOS, which can boot Linux or *BSD or Windows directly, we wouldn't need any separate bootloader software. Someday...