# Yahoo! no longer a FreeBSD stronghold?



## DutchDaemon (Apr 12, 2010)

Came across a job offering, "Yahoo! is hiring Production Engineers!".

Excerpts:



> Develop tools to automate the deployment, administration, and monitoring of a large-scale Linux environment





> 5+ years experience with Linux (RHEL a plus)



What the hell happened there?


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## J65nko (Apr 13, 2010)

Maybe not betting all your money on a single horse, or in other words: diversification?


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## DutchDaemon (Apr 13, 2010)

You think Google has a few FreeBSD farms for diversification?


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## Oko (Apr 13, 2010)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> You think Google has a few FreeBSD farms for diversification?


Absolutely NOT! No U.S. company will deploy non-proprietary system without very, very good 
reason. Whom are they going to sue if the things do not work as expected?

I bet that there no machine running FreeBSD at this point in Yahoo on U.S. soil. However some
of their overseas server farms might.

Unless somebody stands behind FreeBSD with a development and long term support (iX systems 
are too small) the FreeBSD is as much academic/hobby system as any other BSDs.


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## rbelk (Apr 13, 2010)

Oko, how long have you been using FreeBSD? Yahoo has used it for a long time, check out http://bsdfreak.org/2008/12/11/the-fate-of-yahoo/,  http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html, and http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-February/078297.html. Yahoo has sponsered FreeBSD development and has donated a few things to the project also. Unfortunately, they have have not been as active in the last few years.


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## ckester (Apr 13, 2010)

Yahoo has been losing the battle against Google and its other competitors -- for reasons, it must be emphasized, that have nothing to do with FreeBSD.  

I'm not sure Yahoo was ever a good advertisement for the power of BSD.   Too many people think of Yahoo as a second-class operation.


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## Oko (Apr 13, 2010)

rbelk said:
			
		

> Oko, how long have you been using FreeBSD?


Actually, I have not touch a single FreeBSD box for more than three years. These days 
I am using OpenBSD exclusively.


			
				rbelk said:
			
		

> Yahoo has used it for a long time, check out http://bsdfreak.org/2008/12/11/the-fate-of-yahoo/,  http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html, and http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-February/078297.html. Yahoo has sponsered FreeBSD development and has donated a few things to the project also. Unfortunately, they have have not been as active in the last few years.



Read my post carefully. No U.S. company will deploy non-proprietary system without a very 
good reason. The fact that JunoOS (Juniper OS) is almost 80% FreeBSD code doesn't change the fact that they claim that it is 100% proprietary OS developed from the scratch.


When Yahoo started Linux was a joke and Solaris was expensive. So they used FreeBSD. Did I tell you 
dad M$ servers also used to run FreeBSD. Not any more. Today Linux is modern proprietary OS which you can get almost for free. It might not be the best thing after slice of bread but if something goes wrong you can always sue guys from RedHat. Did I tell you that in U.S. Linux=RedHat? 

I hope you get the point.


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## darkshadow (Apr 13, 2010)

they can go to hell I will only use freebsd .... even if they are not ,  I will leave all the computer work for these jerk I will move to other part of the world like project management or I will complete studying German language , I get enough from non guilty software like Linux and stupid gnu , If freebsd or openbsd gone for any reason I will install windows and start gaming and first game I buy  is kill linux


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## darkshadow (Apr 13, 2010)

microsoft is promoting freebsd 
http://www.crn.com/software/18814901;jsessionid=N1CL43EMK0IFXQE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...FA-7462-47D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displaylang=en 
so we dont need yahoo any more


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## vermaden (Apr 13, 2010)

Its pretty outdated 


> On FreeBSD you will need:
> FreeBSD 4.7 (recommended).


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## saxon3049 (Apr 13, 2010)

Those links are a little out of date aren't they, the first is from 2001 the other recommends freebsd 4.x.

It sucks that people are moving away from FreeBSD in a mass centralised environment such as data centres, for a whole host of reasons the main one I can see is that Linux is better at marketing and lots of technical people coming down the pipe have more experience with Linux than BSD we should as a community make more of a effort to publicise FreeBSD in the general media and to the general public.


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## DutchDaemon (Apr 13, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> I bet that there no machine running FreeBSD at this point in Yahoo on U.S. soil. However some of their overseas server farms might.



Well ... it's looking bleak ..



> This is a full time position located in one of Santa Clara, CA; Burbank, CA; New York, NY; Bangalore, Karnataka, IN.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Apr 13, 2010)

A certain linux distro which has a comprehensive wiki
at its site, and an active forum, has the following
three documents readily available:
a 55k HTM file:  networking setup (ifconfig, dhcp, rc.conf etc)
a 65k HTM file: installing the distro
a 220k HTM file: guide to usage (upgrading packages...)

Many persons asking questions here would benefit from
an equivalent documentation ( as an augment to articles
at onlamp.com and the handbook, for persons web-savvy but
not aware of either) as a source of pre-install information.

Just mentioning it as a possible future project for someone.
And as an observation.
Not enough expertise here.


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## ckester (Apr 13, 2010)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> Those links are a little out of date aren't they, the first is from 2001 the other recommends freebsd 4.x.
> 
> It sucks that people are moving away from FreeBSD in a mass centralised environment such as data centres, for a whole host of reasons the main one I can see is that Linux is better at marketing and lots of technical people coming down the pipe have more experience with Linux than BSD we should as a community make more of a effort to publicise FreeBSD in the general media and to the general public.



Is popularity our main goal?  This isn't Linux.

Let's try to think clearly here.  What benefits do we expect to derive from increased use of FreeBSD by the general public or by companies like Yahoo?  Do those benefits outweigh the costs?


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## imp@ (Apr 13, 2010)

Yahoo still has a very large FreeBSD server farm.  Thousands of machines in the US right now, according to sources.  Yahoo doesn't publish its numbers, as it considers that information proprietary.

Rumor's of FreeBSD's demise at Yahoo! are greatly exaggerated.  Yahoo still employs many FreeBSD developers.  They still contribute a lot of code back to FreeBSD and the FreeBSD project.  They still provide a fair amount of rack space for the FreeBSD servers.

In any company as large as Yahoo! there will be pockets of many different kinds of systems.  Companies that size also experiment from time to time with different technologies to ensure their current choice matches their business needs.  I wouldn't make too much of any rumors in this area until Yahoo! makes definitive public statements.

Warner


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## overmind (Apr 13, 2010)

And let's not forget Micro$oft's Hotmail used FreeBSD (and might still use it).

Yahoo started using FreeBSD because they weren't able to install other Linux distribution at first. Now they know 

We'll it is sad that this thing happens but I'm not worried, because FreeBSD have a lot of good stuff no other OS has it.


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## imp@ (Apr 13, 2010)

overmind said:
			
		

> And let's not forget Micro$oft's Hotmail used FreeBSD (and might still use it).


Hotmail has converted over to MS servers.  It only took 4x as many than the FreeBSD servers they replaced...  But that was several years ago.



			
				overmind said:
			
		

> Yahoo started using FreeBSD because they weren't able to install other Linux distribution at first. Now they know


Well, not being able to install Linux wasn't the reason that FreeBSD was used at Yahoo!  Yahoo! had some special needs that Linux just wasn't able to fullfil, but FreeBSD was able to.  In the early days, Linux wasn't stable at all, especially under load.  It didn't scale for beans, especially the network traffic layer.  It just didn't work well in a commercial environment.



			
				overmind said:
			
		

> We'll it is sad that this thing happens but I'm not worried, because FreeBSD have a lot of good stuff no other OS has it.



Well, nothing is finished yet.  Yahoo! is explorting its options, and we'll see if the investments it has made in Linux work out or not.

The bottom line, however, is to remember that FreeBSD is still a very strong player at Yahoo!  New systems are being deployed to meet demands.  The Linux roll out and rumors have been going on for 3 or 4 years now.  I don't see why this one position would change that.

Warner


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## SR_Ind (Apr 13, 2010)

Release engineering...

Release an ISO image containing pre-configured BSD licensed components...a HTTP server, RDBMS, plus add Mono / J2EE / PHP.

Remove dinosaurs like *sendmail*. 

Do that and I can guarantee my developers will format their Red Hat crap overnight.

>>

We manage few FreeBSD boxes as network servers. I've to take time off from management and pre-sales activities to look after those boxes.

There will be change of guard and next generation of architects will consign FreeBSD to dustbin if it takes too much of their time.

Since, Linux and NT has encroached the IT infra in academia this is inevitable. Linux and NT families also ensures uniform and seamless experience between the desktop and servers. Curious kids will dig around command line...they do. Linux and NT ensure that they don't have to wrestle with another OS if they wish to see their girlfriends on webcam or wish to catch up with projects documentation.

Self professed experts in BSD world say that FreeBSD is only meant to be server. Frankly they have no idea of what they are saying and their attitude and disproportionate say in the issue is going to be the cause for gradual marginalization of BSDs.

BSDs will only exist for commercial interests to cannibalize and profit.


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## imp@ (Apr 13, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> Read my post carefully. No U.S. company will deploy non-proprietary system without a very
> good reason. The fact that JunoOS (Juniper OS) is almost 80% FreeBSD code doesn't change the fact that they claim that it is 100% proprietary OS developed from the scratch.
> I hope you get the point.



Interesting, but wrong.

Cisco systems has FreeBSD in the formerly IronPort products.  Many of the Cisco BUs also have FreeBSD in various roles in the network.

Symmetricomm makes a number of systems for high precision time and frequency control, measurement and distribution that has FreeBSD under the hood.

Google has funded much FreeBSD research a Cambridge.  Robert Watson will discuss sandboxing of Chrome on FreeBSD at BSDcan coming up in May.

Juniper deploys FreeBSD under the hood in JunOS.  The bits they are claiming as proprietary are their secret sauce additions.  Juniper is a big FreeBSD contributor.  They have contributed a number of bug fixes into FreeBSD, as well a port to MIPS which is now the basis of FreeBSD/mips.

iX Systems does indeed offer support for FreeBSD and PC-BSD, in addition to their hardware services. [ disclaimer: I work for iX systems these days ]

NetApp's systems have FreeBSD under the hood as well.  They have contributed many bug fixes in the network area, as well as improvements to FreeBSD's NFS stack.

Sandvine makes large FreeBSD storage boxes with a fairly stock FreeBSD.  While Canadian, that doesn't lessen the fact they are using FreeBSD.

iX Systems has a number of clients that are deploying large FreeBSD machines to serve video and other network content.  They have no problems using FreeBSD systems in their production network.  In fact, I'm not allowed to mention who they are because they consider it a competitive advantage.

Cavium Networks and RMI have donated FreeBSD ports to their MIPS platforms, and are supporting efforts to integrate that support into FreeBSD.  These are big network vendors that came to us looking to have their ports integrated because their customers were demanding FreeBSD on these platforms.

These are just a few that I can name off the top of my head that are located in the US.

Warner


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## phoenix (Apr 13, 2010)

And .... what's stopping you from creating that ISO?  

All the tools needed for creating a custom install CD/DVD are included with FreeBSD.  

You can even make it all fit on a mini-CD, or a USB stick.  There are even tools for creating an embeddable version of FreeBSD (tinyBSD, nanoBSD, picoBSD, etc).

The default installer is for the general use case.  What you make of it after that is up to you.


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## ckester (Apr 13, 2010)

Interesting info, Warner.  Thanks!

I think the fact that these companies are contributing code back to the project is the most significant answer to my question about what benefits we can expect from wider adoption.


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## SR_Ind (Apr 13, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> And .... what's stopping you from creating that ISO?
> 
> All the tools needed for creating a custom install CD/DVD are included with FreeBSD.



Precisely. And that's what do for my servers and my laptop (I'm posting from that). But, in a couple of years I'll move even higher up the food chain.  Who'll do all this tinkering then?

What about next generation of techs pouring in from colleges? They have seen only NT or Linux. They use Novell SLES on servers and OpenSUSE on their laptops. Same OS and seamless experience. Same goes with Win 2003 + XP combo. 

There is a maximization of the skills gained on one OS. Computers are no longer equipments hidden away in labs. They have encroached our living rooms. Linux and NT? Yep, the same OS skills that helps you set up a home theatre.

Some of our departments get freshers from non - computers branches. Can I ask them to master 2 or 3 OS's? They will put down their papers, I'll be hauled in to the HR cabin very next day. (I work with Siemens and we seem to be handling every type of engineering activity under the sun  )

My point is present day operating systems need to have value proposition for somewhat wider audiences than it earlier it used to be.

And coming from industry, the trend I see is that operating system are becoming commodity. They should be *readily usable* be it servers, workstations, mobile devices or appliances.


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## rossiya (Apr 13, 2010)

Has everyone forgotten BSDi?  That's the power behind F5 Networks and Macintosh OSX.

This speculation is really off target.  FreeBSD would never die because were development to freeze today, endless code could still be grafted from other projects.  And BSD code lives on in SunOS, Macintosh.  Moreover FreeBSD is an amalgamation of GNU and other projects over the core.  From a genetics view I'd say FreeBSD has spread it's seed far and wide.

If anything, there is a threat that linux and BSD code will cross-pollinate to the point of indistinguishability down the road.


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## rden (Apr 15, 2010)

rossiya said:
			
		

> If anything, there is a threat that linux and BSD code will cross-pollinate to the point of indistinguishability down the road.



It's always looked to move that way but like parallel lines never seem to meet.

The difference I see (and what made FreeBSD my choice) has always been the FreeBSD professional release control.  With FreeBSD I know what I've got, where I got it from, and where the next release will come from.  Linux distro is too messed up, heck even picking a single linux: ubuntu depends too often on "which ubuntu(is it kubuntu or ???) ... with which patches applied." - these patches sometimes coming out daily. (Same goes for redhat too).

None of the BSD'en are that messed up.


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## oliverh (Apr 15, 2010)

>None of the BSD'en are that messed up.

Maybe apart from *cough* DragonFlyBSD *cough* ;-)


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## darkshadow (Apr 15, 2010)

*confirmed*

I know some  one working for yahoo and he tell me they are realy moving to red hat for some reason , really I prefer google over yahoo , if google used freebsd instead of linux we will see different world case it has power more than yahoo ,, mobile for example android


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## oliverh (Apr 15, 2010)

>for example android

Android is using a home-grown Linux kernel plus a libc and parts of the userland from NetBSD/OpenBSD.


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## copypaiste (Apr 16, 2010)

There are still some major players to mention. 
In example, the biggest russian search engines "Yandex" and "Rambler" are known for using and supporting FreeBSD on a large scale. Yandex is currently maintaining ftp5 and ftp6 .ru. mirrors of ftp.freebsd.org. 
Rambler is also known for it's employee - Igor Sysoev, the author of nginx web proxy engine.


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## oliverh (Apr 16, 2010)

Yeah there are many more companies using FreeBSD, but it is more profitable to mention Linux. It's a pity.


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## rden (Apr 16, 2010)

As mentioned getting linux people is easier then getting freebsd folks, aggrivated by the fact that 95% of todays "universities" have been comoditised to produce "instant skilled worker drones" that they teach comp sci courses focused on the hard skills of linux and windows (and a few selected programming languages) rather then soft skills of operating systems and programming languages in general.
(Ask any fresh grad about say Babbage, Turing [tests], even assembly language, . . . <chirp> <chirp> <chirp>)

OIOW today's average uni student can not think outside of a shrink wrapped box.


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## larrypatrickmaloney (Apr 16, 2010)

You can through in CompuServe (now AOL) was using FreeBSD as well.  I know, cause I have some of their old servers!


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## vermaden (Apr 17, 2010)

Another stronghold is lost:
http://blog.hagander.net/archives/167-PostgreSQL-infrastructure-updates.html



> The biggest change is that we will be moving our services off FreeBSD, that we use now, onto Debian GNU/Linux. At the same time, we will switch virtualization solution from FreeBSD Jails to KVM. FreeBSD jails have served us very well over time, but now that we have access to a well working KVM product that uses hardware virtualization, the gains of having full virtualization are much easier to get at.
> 
> One of the main drivers for the change is that maintaining ports-based installs are just taking way too much time. The new system will be based heavily around using Debian packages and the apt system, to the point that everything being installed will always be done using "meta-packages" that will ensure that all our machines look the same way. This also plugs into our monitoring systems very well, making applying (security) updates across the many machines much easier. In particular, it should get rid of what's sometimes a multi-day operation to get everything security patched, due to dependencies and the slowness of updating ports.
> 
> It is quite possible - in fact, I'd say probable - that there are perfectly fine ways of doing this on FreeBSD. But this outlines another big reason for this change - it's simply a lot easier to find people who can do these things on a Linux based system today. Our efforts are entirely volunteer based, and in the end we just don't have people who know enough FreeBSD volunteering to do this work. In fact, we have had several people retire from the sysadmin team over the years specifically because they refuse to work with FreeBSD. We don't expect this change to magically create more volunteers, but it will make it easier to recruit in the future.



... but at least some steps have been done to 'fix' that:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2010-04-11.of-ports-and-men.html


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## saxon3049 (Apr 17, 2010)

@oliverh - That should change, FreeBSD can be a damnsight more cost effective than linux in a production environment and it's a damned sight more stable what we need to do as a community is make more of a effort to get people to use it. I was thinking of passing out a box of FreeBSD CD's to computer science students, move them away from linux and get them skilled with freebsd.


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## darkshadow (Apr 17, 2010)

*losing battle*

it seem like losing battle  ,,,,, linux will become a demonate devil like windows , I start to hate  this ,  I will turn to analyst and design then there is no need for unix ,  installing  windows 7 and using  case tool ( commercial ) one will solve the proplem so linux can go to ****  . if   some day I  try to just experiment something in os  I will do it on minix ,,,,, I used freebsd for 2 year I dont  wana see it fall t will be hard to me so hard  ,,,, you  cant imagine how must I loved it even I forget to use windows ,he was a super servant  ,,,, when it start falling I will install openbsd since it realy not populer and dont need mush support to continue as it is or being continuously developed  even that im so happy with freebsd as it now 


```
Copyright (c) 1992-2009 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 #0: Tue Jan  5 16:02:27 UTC 2010
    [email]root@i386-builder.daemonology.net[/email]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7100  @ 1.80GHz (1795.52-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6fd  Stepping = 13
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
```


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## Matty (Apr 21, 2010)

maybe it's about hardware virtualization with VT which is not supported by freebsd the way it seams to be with linux.
Makes me think tho because jails seems to be a lot less overhead then kvm of xen.

And what about performance of java app servers or oracle. Are there even ora 11 installations on freebsd?
or driver support of some fancy nic .


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## vermaden (Apr 21, 2010)

Matty said:
			
		

> maybe it's about hardware virtualization with VT which is not supported by freebsd the way it seams to be with linux.
> Makes me think tho because jails seems to be a lot less overhead then kvm of xen.


You are confusing _Operating System Level Virtualization_ (Jails) with _Hypervisor Type 2_ (KVM) and _Hypervisor Type 1_ (Xen) here mate ... which is comparing apples to oranges.


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## bojan (Apr 22, 2010)

*Yahoo postion*

Regarding Yahoo position, maybe they are hiring for the one of the companies/systems they acquired that uses Linux like Flickr etc.


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## fronclynne (Apr 23, 2010)

equityspace said:
			
		

> Yahoo will either get eaten up or absorbed by another company, their days are numbered.



So long as they don't do something completely boneheaded (I won't even speculate) they'll be around for a while.  Google.com needs their existence to fend off the inevitable anti-trust suits.  Honestly, if I were google.com, I'd be quietly funnelling cash to yahoo right now.


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## oliverh (Apr 24, 2010)

> Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:05:36
> From: Jeff Roberson <jeff@FreeBSD.org>
> To: src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org,
> svn-src-head@freebsd.org
> ...



They're at least "paying the bills" among others ;-)


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## thuglife (Apr 26, 2010)

From the FreeBSD facebook group.



			
				&quot said:
			
		

> Hey guys - Yahoo! is looking for ROCKSTAR FreeBSD & Linux Production Engineers - location = Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, CA - contact: janelle at yahoo-inc.com


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## rden (Apr 27, 2010)

equityspace said:
			
		

> Yahoo will either get eaten up or absorbed by another company, their days are numbered.



Perhaps Oracle might still have some loose change.

Not completely silly: Oracle could do with a juiced up search platform to keep up in the game keep up with google appliance and Misrable's FAST.


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## ckt1g3r (May 5, 2010)

I do not understand the rivalry between BSD and Linux users ,are both unix like and foss , 
and both are excellent.


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## oliverh (May 5, 2010)

It's rather easy, Linux users don't like UNIX (in fact the don't like anything apart from Linux) but they try to be UNIX-like. *BSD is a descendant of UNIX and doesn't have to try it.


Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

and

What, a real UNIX:

http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html

Apart from that I'm using also Slackware since the early 90s, I like it due to the fact that it is more UNIX-like than the rest of the Linux-distros.


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## DutchDaemon (May 5, 2010)

*(this is not going to turn into a Linux vs FreeBSD thread)*


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## oliverh (May 5, 2010)

Yeah it's of course not Linux Vs FreeBSD, it's more a lamentation about the possible loss of certain support. Because they choose Linux. But why? Finally _it is_ a versus-thing, at least if you dare to give possible answers. So part of the problem is self-made: too many hypocrites in the FreeBSD community. Whining is okay, as long as you don't start reasoning.


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## anomie (May 5, 2010)

thuglife said:
			
		

> From the FreeBSD facebook group...



Yeah, I just did a Yahoo hotjobs search after seeing your post. They're definitely scooping up some FreeBSD + Linux (+ Solaris) folks. 

I love the SF bay area.


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## achix (Oct 20, 2010)

Oko said:
			
		

> Absolutely NOT! No U.S. company will deploy non-proprietary system without very, very good
> reason. Whom are they going to sue if the things do not work as expected?
> 
> I bet that there no machine running FreeBSD at this point in Yahoo on U.S. soil. However some
> ...



So DataPipe, INetU, New York Internet don't deploy FreeBSD systems in US soil?
http://news.netcraft.com/ surveys beg to differ.

Anyway, it's not only about technology. It's about future plans, acquisitions, mergings, finding skilled people (linux has plenty), etc...

.


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## achix (Oct 20, 2010)

Hi Ben! nNice seeing you twice today! I hope iI didn't make any grammatical/spelling errors this time


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## darkshadow (Mar 30, 2011)

*Yahoo no longer uses FreeBSD*

Yahoo has marked FreeBSD as deprecated and they switched most of their systems to RedHat.

Yahoo is a marketing company, they don't care about technology like Google, they only targeting market.


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## phoenix (Mar 30, 2011)

Posting a link to the announcement would be useful.


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## graudeejs (Mar 30, 2011)

I propose to delete this thread as it states something that can't be proved....
I did yahoo search on this topic, but I couldn't find anything new....

The problem with this kind of posts is that they appear on top searches and harm community...


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## DutchDaemon (Mar 30, 2011)

darkshadow, if you can't prove your point there is no real point in posting it on the forums. As it stands now it is mere FUD. Where does this come from?

If Yahoo! personnel would like to respond (we have some subscribers from Yahoo!'s headquarters), go right ahead. Otherwise this topic will be removed.


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## Fred (Mar 30, 2011)

After some digging around...

Yahoo! uses something called Traffic Server, now an Apache project, to handle caching and serving HTTP. From the YDN blog post announcing its open-sourcing, we have:



> The v2.0.x releases are all very close to the same code Yahoo! has successfully been using internally for years. [...]
> 
> Portability - the 2.0.x releases should build on most common Linux flavors. The upcoming 2.1.0 release also builds on many more UNIX platforms, such as Solaris, FreeBSD, and MacOSX.



Yahoo MObStor seems to be their internal document storage system. In the "short-term radar" section, he mentions in passing that it uses Linux.


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## DutchDaemon (Mar 30, 2011)

I'm sure a lot of acquisitions over the years have brought a lot of Linux into the Yahoo! mothership. Take a look at http://developer.yahoo.com/documentation for an overview of the many segments and branches within Yahoo! I think it's too soon to say "It's all Linux now". Sure, a lot was brought in and adopted, but do we know what _all_ of these projects are running on, or that there aren't a million FreeBSD machines purring away in data centers? I don't. I'm not really sure what that developer network is, exactly. Seems like a Sourceforge-type of setup, so it may simply be an OSS platform powered by Yahoo services acting like some sort of an 'API Farm'.


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## kpedersen (Mar 31, 2011)

I think there was a similar thread here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=13226

Though as DutchDeamon said above. This only really shows that Yahoo uses Linux, rather than Yahoo does not use FreeBSD


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 31, 2011)

I know a developer that worked there until just a few months ago. I just tweeted him about this but he's been rather inactive lately.


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## jgh@ (Mar 31, 2011)

I know an engineer over at Zimbra, that is owned by Yahoo. He mentioned to me about 1 1/2 years ago that they were phasing out FreeBSD. I could ping him and see if this is still the case. I really hope it isn't.


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## anomie (Mar 31, 2011)

Sorry, but: FUD until proven otherwise. A 'net search for the relevant terms turns up _only_ this thread at the moment. (And surely this thread doesn't represent any sort of official announcement.)


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## DutchDaemon (Mar 31, 2011)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> I think there was a similar thread here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=13226



Thanks  I knew the topic looked rather familiar ... Threads merged together.


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## DutchDaemon (Mar 31, 2011)

An anonymous birdie suggests that they're stuck at FreeBSD 6 and phasing out due to its EOL status, FWIW. Would be nice to hear from 'within'.


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## phoenix (Mar 31, 2011)

jgh said:
			
		

> I know an engineer over at Zimbra, that is owned by Yahoo. He mentioned to me about 1 1/2 years ago that they were phasing out FreeBSD. I could ping him and see if this is still the case. I really hope it isn't.



Nope, Yahoo! sold Zimbra last year to VMWare.  Zimbra 7.0 is a VMWare release.


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## jgh@ (Apr 1, 2011)

phoenix said:
			
		

> Nope, Yahoo! sold Zimbra last year to VMWare.  Zimbra 7.0 is a VMWare release.



Forgot about that. Still doesn't mean that it would still be the case, though.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 4, 2011)

After a week, my source finally answered but with no good info:


> I couldn't really tell ya, actually. Casually I've seen mainly rhel and less bsd, but I don't spend time at that part of the stack, so I'm not a good or quotable source.


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## vermaden (Apr 8, 2011)

Seems that only 25% of YAHOO! is FreeBSD.



			
				&quot said:
			
		

> Today, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Sven Dummer, Director of Linux engineering at Yahoo!, explained that 75% of Yahooâ€™s Web sites and services run on Linux. The rest? It runs on FreeBSD.


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## da1 (Apr 8, 2011)

Like someone stated, in the US linux=RH.


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## Fred (Apr 9, 2011)

vermaden said:
			
		

> Seems that only 25% of YAHOO! is FreeBSD.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Now that's a quote with much more authority. 25% of 100 000 servers is 25 000, that's not exactly ridiculous... Is there a complete transcript of Sven's talk available?


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## vermaden (Apr 11, 2011)

Fred said:
			
		

> Is there a complete transcript of Sven's talk available?


I haven't checked mate.


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## DutchDaemon (Apr 22, 2011)

Say bye-bye to Yahoo!

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Yahoo-joins-the-Linux-Foundation-1231457.html


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## captobvious (Apr 22, 2011)

Wow that is kinda sad to hear.

It is good PR when a large (and occasionally successful) company uses 'free' software; kinda real world proof of concept that the stuff works well enough for a company that is interested in profitability to trust it.

Any other high profile companies publicly use FreeBSD?


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## da1 (Apr 22, 2011)

captobvious said:
			
		

> Any other high profile companies publicly use FreeBSD?



Besides this, I believe we should also ask ourselves the question "To what extent does a company use FreeBSD?" because even though FreeBSD was named the unknown giant among free operating systems, by IBM, I have no knowledge what so ever of this company using FreeBSD.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 22, 2011)

We shouldn't be getting ourselves down because of this. Many quality products aren't used as much, or even fail in the market place, as those that are popular. As some have said, what has made Linux popular may be to its detriment. Being popular with amateurs should not be a goal but frequently these amateurs become professionals and they use what they're familiar with. Why else would you see Windows in some technical environments where it just seems out of place? Many Linux coders are transplanted Windows coders who try to make Linux work like Windows.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm going off on Linux or start a flame war, I'm not, but trying to make a point.


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## UNIXgod (Apr 22, 2011)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> We shouldn't be getting ourselves down because of this. Many quality products aren't used as much, or even fail in the market place, as those that are popular. As some have said, what has made Linux popular may be to its detriment. Being popular with amateurs should not be a goal but frequently these amateurs become professionals and they use what they're familiar with. Why else would you see Windows in some technical environments where it just seems out of place? Many Linux coders are transplanted Windows coders who try to make Linux work like Windows.
> 
> I don't want to make it sound like I'm going off on Linux or start a flame war, I'm not, but trying to make a point.



Yahoo! used FreeBSD for over 20 years. During a time of which they where an up and coming company with silly ads on tv. During a time of exponential growth. If FreeBSD advocacy is in question I would still say that 20+ years of scaling even during it's peak era is still worth its weight in gold.


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## pkubaj (Apr 22, 2011)

How could Yahoo have used FreeBSD for over 20 years if FreeBSD project was created in 1993 (18 years ago)?


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## Beastie (Apr 22, 2011)

That's regrettable.


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## UNIXgod (Apr 23, 2011)

pkubaj said:
			
		

> How could Yahoo have used FreeBSD for over 20 years if FreeBSD project was created in 1993 (18 years ago)?



Sorry I stand corrected.


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## _martin (Apr 23, 2011)

As mentioned by Dutchdaemon, yahoo! and linux foundation.

I wonder what was the main reason for it. If I have to bet I would say due to a stronger virtualization environment linux can offer.


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## vivek (May 1, 2011)

Yahoo has modified version of FreeBSD, known as Y! BSD. Originally it was based on 4.x and later moved to 6.x. They have now mix of Y! BSD and RHEL stuff. Most of new cloud stuff is in RHEL but old good email, hosting, and lots of other stuff stills runs on FreeBSD. However, they are slowly moving from BSD to Linux due to cloud, virtualization, strong support for network storage (apart from NFS) and may be because of Linux brand. This is sad but true ...


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## fredericck (May 13, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> I propose to delete this thread as it states something that can't be proved....
> I did yahoo search on this topic, but I couldn't find anything new....
> 
> The problem with this kind of posts is that they appear on top searches and harm community...



Yes, I also didn't manage to find anything new, but I don't think that the thread should be deleted. The topic is being actively discussed.


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## graudeejs (May 13, 2011)

fredericck said:
			
		

> Yes, I also didn't manage to find anything new, butI don't think that the thread sgould be deleted. The topic is being actively discussed.



I posted that before thread in question was merged in this thread


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## jrm@ (Jun 2, 2011)

*an excerpt from a message on the freebsd-jobs mailing list*



> Yahoo!, the little internet portal that could, has a number of openings
> for unixy security people.  It's no secret that Yahoo! is using FreeBSD
> for a large portion of their hosts, but the job requirements are in
> general not all that operating system specific.


abc


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