At the "Ghost in the Machine" panel discussion Tim O'Reilly essentially asked Jeremy Zawodny (developer relations, yahoo), Chris DiBona (open source program manager, google), and Jim Buckmaster (CEO, craigslist) how do they use open source and how do they contribute to open source. First, all three basically said they would not exist without open source. Jeremy said yahoo uses freeBSD, linux, C, C++, PHP, Perl, and Python on its servers and the desktops are "across the board". Chris said google uses linux, mysql, gcc, g++, and python, but not a lot of apache. They have developed their own web server for better throughput. Jim said that craigslist uses the LAMP model (linux, apache, mysql, perl) and ubuntu on the desktops.
How do you contribute to the open source community? First, they all have developers who submit patches to many different open source projects. Second, yahoo and google have hired many major contributors to open source projects who have the job of continuing the development of the project; but they also make enhancements that are not rolled out because it gives them a competitive advantage. Also, google and yahoo have free APIs and all three make monetary contributions to open source projects.
Why don't you contribute more of your code to the open source community? All three said something akin to 1) the code is not up to the standard of open source code (it would be embarrassing), 2) the code is what sets us apart from our competitors, 3) the code would be useless without the underlying infrastructure, 4) moving from closed source to open source can take a lot of resources so its hard to determine what would be best to open source, and 5) we don't want spammers learning how we find spam.
Also, Jim Buckmaster has to be the most laid-back CEO of a successful company I have ever seen.
Photo courtesy of James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media.
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