These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.
Uhm, here's a bunch of code we wrote that is mostly useless to us. Let's bestow it on the unwashed masses and see if they can make it useful.
The company has to first make sure that each of the technologies will really be useful and provide significant value outside Yahoo, before releasing it to open source, Chaiken said. It takes time and effort to go through the open source process, and to build a community around open source, so the company has to first make sure there will be interest from developers, he added.
Let's float some new stories to some techie sites to see if anyone would like to fix our stuff for free.
Releasing technology to the open source community helps Yahoo build recognition and a technical brand in the technical community, and also develop relationships with universities and companies, Chaiken said. There could also be some financial benefits in getting community developers to work on a project, he added.
We love free labor.
In all seriousness, this article seems like a non-story to me. Some huge corp is releasing stuff that they don't find very valuable in an attempt to see if someone out there can make it valuable for free. I'd be a whole lot more interested if they were releasing something that was already a technological breakthrough. Using the open source community as your free labor drones just feels wrong.