Microsoft says it’s the engineers that are valuable to the company but would Microsoft still be willing to pay 42 billion for the company if Yahoo! opened the source to most of its services like Yahoo! Pipes for instance? Many companies operate profitably by using the community that loves them to not only monetize their product but improve it. I look at Sun Microsystems as one such visionary company who can operate under this type of license but I don’t think Microsoft could. They just paid billions for MySQL.
In a world where execution, ideas, and the ability to bring it all together matter the most, what would happen if Yahoo took the ultimate Microsoft poison pill? Would Microsoft be GNU’ed off? Would Yahoo’s net value plummet or would a new Yahoo! cult following gathering lift them in the air like a pillar above Google and them all? Just like the pillar of semantic goodness they currently are at this point; Yahoo makes all of it’s money of the people and eyeballs who visit the sites they have created.
They probably wouldn’t even have to open source their search and advertising platforms for it to make Microsoft change its mind. What are your thoughts? As I write this, I feel a bit silly, and stupid and ignorant but sometimes that’s what it takes to form an answer to a problem. What would happen if Yahoo did do this? What if it stopped the buyout. What if it saved Yahoo? I might need some protection I think. $42 billion dollars is a lot of money so it will probably never happen but what the hell. Maybe they are just going to try to stall until a change at the White House happens.
GeekSpeaker 
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