The Register did a good job describing the dichotomy between the product business and the tech side of the business here, related to a previous open source project Yahoo published (disclaimer, I run the open source process at Yahoo) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/yahoo_tensorflow_on...
"Over the decades Yahoo! has contributed substantially to the greater good, publishing its own code as open source.
Arguably Yahoo!’s greatest legacy once it is a division of Verizon will be big data, after one of its engineers – Doug Cutting – wrote an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce that became Hadoop. What followed was an entire ecosystem of startups and projects crunching data at scale – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR to name three in a market some calculate will be worth $50bn by 2020."
My job is to manage the open source process for Oath (which is essentially Yahoo + AOL). That includes helping ensure we can publish code like this and the hundreds of other projects we publish too. I'm the one who cares about open source licenses, patent clauses, github permissions, etc. Many large tech companies have someone in a comparable role and some of us work together in the todogroup to help manage the way we do opensource. I'm beginning to meet the people in Verizon who do the same. I hope their open source legacy grows too. Heck I celebrate when Google, Amazon, and Comcast publish great code too. It's good for us all. But Vespa is a real treat. It's really really special to Yahoo and we are very hopeful that the Big Data community sees how many things they can do with this, at scale, the way we have.
"Over the decades Yahoo! has contributed substantially to the greater good, publishing its own code as open source.
Arguably Yahoo!’s greatest legacy once it is a division of Verizon will be big data, after one of its engineers – Doug Cutting – wrote an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce that became Hadoop. What followed was an entire ecosystem of startups and projects crunching data at scale – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR to name three in a market some calculate will be worth $50bn by 2020."