Open Yahoo!

I've had a few people ask us why we went public with our libraries.

Having been intimitately involved in the bringing the pattern library live I can tell you first hand the simple reasons they have gone public. And these are good reasons for others to do the same.

• Goodwill. Sharing back with the community always pays back in rich dividends.
  
  
• Feedback. Lots of eyes and lots of hands make the libraries better. We recognize that there are a lot of smart folks outside the halls of Yahoo!
  
  
• Dialog. Brings issues to the forefront for discussion. Like accessibility for design; common design libraries and language.
  
  
• Reuse. Best corporate reuse strategy is open source. I saw it at Sabre with Rico. Same at Yahoo. Already groups are using the libraries more now that they are public. And it energizes people to participate in something bigger than all of us.
  
  
• Standards. If some of our better design ideas spread then it is good for our users and in turn good for us. Relearning different ways to do the same thing is only fun for so long :-)
  
  
• Mindset. Yahoo! has a lot of folks in management, design & engineering that have benefited greatly from the open source community. This gets in your blood. It becomes part of your value system. So it becomes a natural reflex to do it this way.
  

That's basically the reasoning. No big surprise.

And yes, we don't share everything. We have lots of really awesome research going on. Really cool stuff coming. Sorry that won't be in the next release of the libraries ;-) But I think that is understandable.

Yahoo! Libraries Released - Ajax & Patterns

I am excited to announce that just a little while ago, we (Yahoo!) released two new (previously internal) libraries to the public.

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is being released under a friendly Creative Commons License. The goal is to share common patterns we see emerging on Yahoo! We hope that by opening up our design patterns that we can both share our thinking and garner your feedback.

At the same time we are releasing the Yahoo! User Interface Library. This is an industrial strength Ajax/DHTML library that we are currently using in lots of places all across Yahoo! Its got drag and drop, animation, event management, position handling, widgets, etc. And its all under the BSD license!

And we are announcing a new blog for both of these libraries. The Yahoo! User Interface Blog discusses both of these libraries in detail. You can choose to subscribe to all of the articles there, just the design side or just the development side.

And finally, we have a Yahoo! groups forum for discussing patterns and the UI library will be part of the current Yahoo! Developer Network JavaScript forum.

Go check it out!