Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Via /.:

"Jimmy Wales announced today that Yahoo! has ordered 23 HP servers for the Wikimedia Foundation. The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each. They will also provide rackspace and bandwidth. The announcement comes four months after Google's announcement of support, and two months after Yahoo's own. Google has not yet made their intentions clear. You can read more about the specifications of what will soon be a 100+ server cluster at the Wikimedia Servers wiki article."

You know, it is funny. For all the talk about the great public repositories of knowledge all the way back to LBJ (seriously, listen to that link for the LBJ quote at the end of the CPB story), it is funny that (a) it took an Open Source group to actually make it happen, and (b) once it did all the "Internet companies" recognize that having it around add value to their over all business. With other groups integrating Wikipedia content into software like media players and word processors, and Google and Answers and Yahoo! building entire new businesses around it, I think it is both tragic and beautiful that it takes the mass of the public to actually work up the gumption to build these things that have always been supposed to be about "the future".