January 23, 2008 8:59 PM PST
Yahoo! censoring open source to buddy up to Microsoft? Not likely
Slated is suggesting that Yahoo! is censoring out open source on its Answers service. Apparently some suggestions that people try Ubuntu, among other things, have been marked as a "violation of...Community Guidelines or Terms of Service."
This has, as you'd expect, kicked up a small furor of conspiracy theory (Yahoo! is playing nice to Microsoft in anticipation of a merger) and silliness.
Could it be instead that someone made a mistake?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I never complain when my views on Micro$haft get censored!
As to the assertion that, because Yahoo! uses Open Source software, that somehow makes them immune to acting against the better interests of GNU/Linux ... well how about Novell, Xandros, TurboLinux and Linspire?
Is Yahoo!'s anti-Linux behaviour a matter of corporate policy, or merely the act of a few Microsoft fanboys working as moderators on their Answers service?
I don't know; only Yahoo! can answer that question.
It doesn't alter the results for those who are censored though, does it?
- by beelinebill January 26, 2008 6:15 PM PST
- Yahoo recently bought Zimbra, the open source collaboration suite! Maybe the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing! Otherwise, some people may be just misinformed at Yahoo.
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