We may have thousands of talented developers under our roof, but nothing beats the scale of the open source community — where programmers around the world volunteer their expertise to collaborate virtually in the name of tackling some of today’s toughest computing challenges.

That’s why we’re becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that provides support for open source projects like the Apache HTTP server (which powers much of the Yahoo! network and has for more than 10 years), Lucene (the search software widely used on the Web), and Hadoop (which lets developers easily write and run applications that process massive amounts of data). All of these are community-driven efforts that will help define the future of web services.

We’re a big believer in giving back to this community After all, it could be the source of the next big breakthrough. You may recall that we recently unleashed a supercomputer, which researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using as their distributed computing playground. We also have several engineers actively contributing to Apache’s Hadoop. In fact, we’re the project’s largest contributor and were so impressed with its potential, that we hired its founder, Doug Cutting, who’s also a VP at Apache.

We’ve been a huge open source beneficiary and hope our support of Apache will continue to improve the quality and expand the usage of critical software that will propel the entire industry.

Jay Kistler
VP, Systems, Tools and Services
Search & Advertising Technology Group