Yahoo is a well-known user of, and contributor to, open source projects. The company is most closely associated with Hadoop, and rightly so, as it is this open source project's biggest contributor. Last month, it sponsored the Hadoop Summit 2011, in which its internal Hadoop experts, and others, ran a collection of workshops on the distributed workload operating system. It even announced that Yahoo had collected some top Hadoop engineers and spun off a new company, Hortonworks. Hortonworks hopes to sell Hadoop consulting services to enterprises.
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But that's not the only project Yahoo relies on, says Todd Papaioannou, vice president of cloud architecture for Yahoo. It is also a big user/contributor to the Xen server virtualization project. (Earlier last month, the open source Xen code for Dom0 was accepted into the Linux mainline kernel.)
Yahoo also has a long history of releasing its custom wares as open source projects.
In 2009 it released its "Traffic Server" app and continues to contribute to it, says Papaioannou. Traffic Server is software initially acquired via Inktomi, which caches and serves content, among other features. It open sources a project called S4, for real-time stream analysis. This tool helps others build their own personalization engines. It released its user interface JavaScript and CSS library known as the Yahoo User Interface, or YUI 3.
Yahoo also contributes to Linux and is a big user of Apache/PHP/Tomcat. "Open source is very important to us. We continue to contribute and donate to open source projects, as well as bringing in new open source technologies. We want to work with the community to build the next-generation cloud components," Papaioannou says.
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