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Microsoft goes open source

by on08 May 2009

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Well a bit of it


While
Microsoft's official line is that open source is a bit like syphilis, the way you get it is nice but you will wish you hadn't, it seems that its Kumo search team are using it anyway.

Microsoft's new Kumo search technology is filled to the brim with open source code and officially the search team, formerly Powerset, "tr(ies) to use open-source software, if it is available." According to the teams description of its work, instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene subproject that is a framework for running data-intensive applications on large clusters of commodity hardware.

Unfortunately, there was no Hadoop equivalent to Google's BigTable storage engine so Powerset decided to give back to the community by developing an open-source analog to BigTable that is built on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). The theory is that the Big Table needs to be developed and it isn't part of the Powerset "secret sauce" so why not hand it over to the Open Source community to help.

The move is starting to be seen as a change in Microsoft's attitude to Open Source.  While Redmond is not that happy with it, it is very keen on consuming open-source software and embedding it into its proprietary products. Generally the feel in Redmond is starting to be that it wasted a lot of years treating Open Source like a dose of the clap and much more cash would have been saved if it had embraced such code early.

Its rival, Google, is a big fan of Open Source.
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