[nycbug-talk] MS, the Yahoo buyout, and FreeBSD

[George Rosamond]

Jonathan Vanasco wrote:
> On Feb 1, 2008, at 12:41 PM, Patrick Tracanelli wrote:
> 
>> I was asking myself the same questions. As a Y! investor I am happy to
>> see this offer, but as a FreeBSD professional I am not. And saying  
>> 'NO'
>> to this offer, right after Y! announced such that big layoffs, is
>> psichologically difficult to believe, from an investor perspective.
>>
>> There is also the good "marketing" that Yahoo! represents to FreeBSD,
>> wether they are still very relevant to the project as donators or not.
>> For example, Yahoo! + FIFA world cup partnership marketed FreeBSD  
>> as the
>> main OS in the world cup internet infra-structure, etc, etc. What else
>> and how negative would it be to the Project? I hope not much.
>

Hmmm. . . Not particularly a soccer fan myself Patrick, but did they 
mention FBSD in their marketing?


> Yahoo are also big proponents of the LAMP stack, particularly PHP &  
> MySQL
> 
> Even with the resources behind the 1BN MySQL buyout, a lot of the  
> 'enterprise' performance and engineering improvements & knowledge  
> have been coming from large-scale deployments like Yahoo's.   
> Converting to SQLserver could be a painful loss.  Converting to .NET  
> could be a nightmare too.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to remember back to the Hotmail Microsoft 
purchase, and that controversial white paper. . .

http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html

I think on the whole it's bad for technology, regardless of the players.

There are of course a laundry list of negatives for BSD land. . . all 
those servers hosted by Yahoo. . . the fact that it's Yahoo responsible 
for a huge proportion of BSD hosts out there in terms of numbers. . .

If this does happen, I'm really not looking forward to the dualopoly of 
MS and Google in so many arenas.

My gut feeling is that with the delay in a full response from Yahoo, 
it's a likely thing.

Who knows, maybe this will mean we'll have MS as a sponsor for the con 
(dumb joke:)

g