For over ten years, Yahoo! has been building some of the Internet's most popular content and services on an Open Source platform. Yahoo! uses a lot of Open Source Software (OSS) internally including Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL. Jeremy Zawodny says that OSS helps them to "remix" and configure the software to their needs.

OSS has good support from mailing lists and online forums. Commercial support is available from distribution vendors and recently commercial support is available from independent service vendors such as spikesource. OSS software has good documentation as well as well commented code which is a great help when reconfiguring and modifying the software to fit Yahoo!'s needs. Also many open source applications are available on a variety of platforms like FreeBSD and Linux.

Yahoo! is trying to become a Web 2.0 company. It recently acquired Konfabulator and Flickr as a part of this plan and OSS helps Yahoo! to move in that direction.

---

IT Conversations' publication of this program is underwritten by your donations and:

---

Jeremy Zawodny is Yahoo's resident MySQL Geek. He is also the lead author of High Performance MySQL. He has been using MySQL in various capacities at Yahoo! for over four years and has written numerous articles for Linux Magazine and has been speaking about MySQL at conferences since 2000.

Resources:

• Jeremy Zawodny's Blog
• Konfabulator
• Flickr

This program is from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon August 1-5, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Vinayak Hegde
• Post-production audio engineer: Minh Truong
• Series producer: Darusha Wehm