I’m afraid I’ve never really understood why LookSmart owned Grub. It just didn’t make sense. And apparently LookSmart didn’t understand either, because Grub has been sold to Wikia, which has released it as open source.

For those of you playing along at home: Grub is a distributed computing project aimed at spidering the Web. Like Seti@Home, Grub uses spare computer cycles of its users, only in Grub’s case the Web gets crawled instead of aliens searched for. LookSmart bought Grub back in March 2003 and, as far as I can tell, sat on it for over four years. Then Wikia came along and bought it. Wikia, you may know, is the search-engine-from Wiki concept that’s been coming along for the last several months.

Not only has Wiki acquired Grub, but has also released it under an open source license. Not a lot going on yet — seems like the project has been moribund for quite a while. Another one to put on my radar…