San Francisco–If you know anything about big companies that run Linux, you know Google runs on Linux. Yes, every time you do a Google search you are, in one sense, a Linux user. What far fewer people know is that Yahoo is also a Linux company. Today, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Sven Dummer, Director of Linux engineering at Yahoo!, explained that 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux. The rest? It runs on FreeBSD.
While Yahoo isn’t as big as it used to be, it still, according to Dummer, has 100,000s of servers, 640-million users, and over a 1 billion visits a months. According to Netcraft’s list of the most popular Web sites in the world, that’s still good enough to put Yahoo in as the 13th most popular Web site on the globe, or the fourth if you count all the international Google sites as one. In other words, Yahoo is still a player.
So what does Yahoo use? Well, Dummer explained, “Yahoo has its own Linux distribution, YLinux, targeted for out specific needs. It’s based on Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Yes, that’s right Yahoo is another Red Hat customer helping Red Hat become a billion dollar company.