Re: PHP (and Perl) at Yahoo!

[ignatz]

For me the most interesting line is

"We customize Open Source software we use
- often improvements are not sent back
– many are gross Y!-specific hacks"

Will Yahoo! start acting like a good open-source neighbor? If they start giving back to the community that could be a real boost to PHP. If not, it becomes an interesting bit of internet trivia, much like the stories I heard about them doing custom work to get Oracle to play well with Free-BSD. I have no idea if it was true, but there was a time when it would have been real handy to have learned from their experiences. The Free-BSD community would have really benefited from a heavy hitter like Yahoo being more than just users of other peoples work.

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[tomhukins]

The Free-BSD community would have really benefited from a heavy hitter like Yahoo being more than just users of other peoples work.

I'm afraid I'm drifting way off-topic here, but I'd like to correct this comment. Yahoo have done lots of good work for the FreeBSD community. Yahoo employ several FreeBSD committers and other people who have contributed to the project. Yahoo host and manage many of the servers that run FreeBSD's CVS repository, Web site, mail, package building, etc. Their staff seem happy to publicly state that their Web servers run on FreeBSD, as in this presentation. I consider them "more than just users of other peoples work".

[ignatz]

--/me Stupid foot. I stand corrected.

My only experience is specifically to do with FreeBSD running Oracle client libraries. At the time it was very frustrating knowing that Yahoo! was able to get it work but we couldn't (cleanly). Given that it is a comercial product running on an open source OS, that could add to the complexity.

Node provided for additional downvotes.

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