VNUNet reports that Yahoo! and Google have been accused of being “bad open source citizens" since they do not open up source code for all internally developed apps. The allegation comes from the VP for business development at Alfrasco, an open source software company.

It is disappointing that they are such heavy users of open source and have architected themselves into a corner that makes giving back impossible or problematic.

I didn’t know. If Alfrasco is hurtin’ for code, I’ll write them some.

In response, Jeremy Zawodny, a MySQL developer at Yahoo! counters: "Being good open source citizens means contributing where it makes sense..." In other words, what can open source do for Yahoo!.

VNUNet continues that aspects of Yahoo!'s design approach “requires the code to be tightly knit together and to include references to trade secrets...” Zawodny adds that Yahoo! simply does not want to disclose some of its code.

There'd be places in the code where magic voodoo functions are called but we couldn't really talk about what they do or how they might work. That's called our secret sauce or 'business logic' if you prefer. A good deal of that is kept under wraps for very legitimate reasons.

Further, Yahoo! welcomed the possibility of receiving bug fixes but it does not have much to gain from volunteer developers adding features to Yahoo! Services. One reason according to Zawodny is that Yahoo! would be “beat(en) up for not integrating it (open source contributions) fast enough. It's tricky to introduce new features to a product that tens of millions of people are using."

Wow, technical reasons for not going open source...

posted by Noel Le @ 1:47 PM | Free Culture Movement

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