[C4stor]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

The point of Joel's article is that "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements."

For what I understand, Yahoo is a media company, and as so it may try to commoditize a natural complement of today's media companies, which is data search.

[jogjayr]

That article is a classic but I don't really understand how it applies in this case.

Smart companies commoditize their products' complements (something that needs to be bought with the product) so that whoever wants buy their product has a large variety of offerings to select from. For instance, MS-DOS's ability to run on any standard PC architecture machine commoditized the PC.

It's not clear how commoditizing data search makes selling media to consumers easier, because consumers of media don't buy data search. In fact they expect it to come for free from the media company.

Might it not have the opposite effect instead? That is, it makes starting up a media company cheaper and allows competitors to spend more money on acquiring media?

[KGIII]

Yahoo! gets code improvements back and, by being the originals and having the most experts familiar with the entire code base - and it is huge, they retain their competitive advantage. They also do this while fostering good will and, potentially, reducing the number of bugs, improving security, and increasing efficiency.

It's brilliant, in a way. There are risks, but they are small and mitigated. They may even end up selling support and customizations, or enabling that market. The upside potentials are many and the downsides are few and only risk small impacts.

Hell, you can get RedHat for the low cost of nothing, just by signing up for it. On top of that, they will give you every single last line of code you want. They'll give you all of the code, and do it for free.

Yet, they are a successful for-profit company. They don't even accept financial donations, as far as I know. They aren't the wealthiest company, but they are doing quite well and not suffering financially.

Open source doesn't mean no profit. It just means additional rights for the source code and/or user. (Different licenses prioritize different liberties and have different goals.)

[whage]

Good point, thanks for the excellent article!