SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 13 -- Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced that it has become a platinum sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Continuing its dedication to open and collaborative computing and research, Yahoo's financial sponsorship of the non-profit, volunteer-run foundation will help provide much-needed working capital, hardware infrastructure, and support resources required to serve the ASF's industry-defining projects and incubating initiatives.

Yahoo's support of the ASF stemmed from its work with the Apache HTTP Server and Lucene projects. Today, several members of Yahoo's development teams are active, long-term code contributors to Apache Hadoop, the open source platform that makes it possible to efficiently process vast amounts of data on a cluster of commodity hardware.

Leading the industry in supporting free and open software for building the next-generation of Internet-scale Web services, Yahoo is contributing to an open source version of these powerful tools which are freely available to anyone who needs them. In addition, Yahoo is committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in distributed computing through the incubation of new Apache projects.

Yahoo has embraced, adopted, and contributed to community-driven initiatives and related open source technologies. This, in turn, enables engineers and researchers around the world to cost effectively tackle the most challenging problems in computing today, including search, analytics, machine learning, scientific modeling and more.

"Yahoo is one of the few companies in the world that has the necessary resources, expertise and experience to build software of this quality and scale," said David Filo, Yahoo co-founder. "Sponsoring the ASF demonstrates our commitment to quality open source infrastructure. Both Yahoo and the open source community have benefited from collaborating with the ASF, and we're proud to be able to give back -- by sharing our expertise and technology, as well as on a financial basis. We look forward to furthering our participation with the ASF in years to come."

"Sponsorship is key to our financial viability, which, in turn, benefits the open source community at large," said ASF president Justin Erenkrantz. "Yahoo's participation helps ensure that both our developer community and distributed computing projects continue to grow. We are thankful for Yahoo's generous support and welcome them into our sponsorship program."

Yahoo joins current ASF sponsors Google, HP, Covalent, Tetsuya Kitahata and Two Sigma Investments.

About the Apache Software Foundation

Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of Open Source software projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software for more than a decade. The foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors' potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products. For more information, see www.apache.org.

About Yahoo

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal.