Microsoft Embraces Elephant of Open Source

It took more than three years, but Microsoft has finally learned to stop worrying and love Hadoop. Hadoop -- an open source platform for crunching epic amounts of a data across an army of dirt-cheap servers -- underpins everything from Facebook and Twitter to Yahoo! The company is now working to port the Hadoop platform to Windows -- it was built for use atop Linux -- and Doug Leland, general manager of product management for SQL Server, told Wired that the company plans to eventually release its work back to the open source community. This time last year, Microsoft lent its support to another big name open source project: OpenStack project, an effort to build "infrastructure clouds" along the lines of Amazon's EC2. The company’s rather complicated relationship to open source was exemplified by its 2008 purchase of Powerset, a semantic search startup based in San Francisco that was among the first companies to embrace Hadoop.