Mary Jo Foley asks Could Yahoo’s ‘openness’ be another anti-Microsoft poison pill?

Yahoo traditionally has been and continues to be a big open-source backer. It runs its datacenters on open-source software (something Microsoft officials have said they don’t intend to rip and replace immediately — while avoiding saying never).

But over the past couple of weeks, Yahoo has really been banging its “we’re more open than ever” drum.”

Yahoo announced in mid-February that it had implemented what it believed to be “the world’s largest commercial application of Apache Hadoop Java-based distributed-computing framework.” Yahoo is using Hadoop to process its Webmap, which is its “application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo Search,” according to the Yahoos.

I can honestly say from my vantage point that openness at Yahoo! has nothing to do with Microsoft or any other would-be suitor.
We've been on the openness road for a long, long time at Yahoo. And we take it rather seriously. Some times it hasn't been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data. The Open Source adoption and work. The APIs. The way we communicate with users and partners. The Blogs. The RSS feeds.

I'll be speaking about a small bit of this at the Business of APIs Conference in New York on Monday. And also at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference. And, of course, the Hadoop Summit too.

You'll be reading more and hearing more about openness at Yahoo! from me and Yahoo's much higher up the food chain in the coming months.

Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I'd have left Yahoo! years ago if I didn't see it happening.

If you think the last few weeks are big, you haven't seen anything yet! :-)