Prominent open-source developer bids Yahoo adieu

Update 8:25 a.m. PDT: I added a dash more detail about his next job.

Jeremy Zawodny, a programmer who helped launched the Yahoo Developer Network and worked on many other internal projects at the Internet company, said on Thursday that he's leaving for a "much smaller company."

Jeremy Zawodny

(Credit: Jeremy Zawodny)

"In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge," he said in a blog post. "After 8.5 years of service, and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time for me to move on has arrived."

Zawodny was quick to say that Microsoft's machinations and Carl Icahn's agitations are unrelated to his departure. "The opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself, and it was simply too interesting to pass up," he said.

In an e-mail, he said he'd be starting work again at the end of July--"right around the time that OSCon (the Open Source Convention) starts...It's not an open-source company but they do use a lot of open source and would like to contribute more to open source."

At Yahoo, Zawodny wasn't just a behind-the-scenes coder. Projects visible to the outside world included the Yahoo Developer Network and the Yahoo Search Blog, and he was a notable promoter of open-source software such as Hadoop and a believer in openness in general.

"Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open-source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I'd have left Yahoo years ago, if I didn't see it happening," he said in March.

That philosophy aligns closely with the Yahoo Open Strategy, under which Yahoo is trying to make itself an open foundation for others' Web-based applications and to expose some of its inner workings for use by other Web sites.