Yahoo! fights back

Jeremy Zawodny earned his stripes today with a great riposte to my original complaint that Yahoo! and Google are architecturally prevented from opening up more code.

Jeremy's reply is intelligent and measured (despite his thinking that he was being negative - hey, I blog with Dave Rosenberg - Jeremy has never even approached that level of negativity ;-). But aside from a "we're doing better!" closing line, he doesn't do much except underline my core argument: open source is hard; it may be particularly hard for Yahoo! and Google; but this is not a satisfactory answer. I wasn't accusing Yahoo! of writing poor code (as you well know, Jeremy, and wasted pixels writing that), but of contributions disproportionate to what you have received from open source. That's all.

You write:

...[L]et's suppose that we decided to release "what we can" into the open source world. Of course, there'd be a lot of legal vetting first. Code licensing is a real mine field, but let's suppose that we cleared that hurdle. It would look as if Yahoo was doing exactly what businesses looking to get into open source are told NOT to do: throwing some half-baked code "over the wall" and slapping a license on it.

No, it really wouldn't. I helped to manage Novell's inflow and outflow of open source for two years, and the community response is rarely what you describe. Yes, there are obnoxious loudmouths (in which class you'd probably place me :-) who are never satisfied you've done enough. But most people aren't like that. Intent matters a great deal in open source.

As for how much code I've personally published, zero. I'm not a programmer. You wouldn't want my code - really. Not because it's secret and not useful to this or that person without a massive infrastructure (your (very valid) argument for defending Yahoo!), but because it would be absolute drivel.

But my entire career has been spent working for companies who do nothing but compete by releasing free software. So I have some experience about how hard it is, and how rewarding it can be. You should download my latest project. It's called Alfresco, and is the best content repository on the planet, open or proprietary. I'd be happy to set Yahoo! up with a sweetheart of a deal.... :-)