The future is open
There's definitely a lot of momentum in favour of open source software these days.
Most of this is being driven by the convergence of the telco and PC sectors, as Intel and the ARM ecosystem meet in the middle to provide PC class computing on handheld devices. So we have the popularity of Google's Android going exponential, Intel developing its own Linux-based OS - Moblin - and ARM partners like Qualcomm making a big noise about open source.
One of the drivers behind this momentum is the inability to run a full version of Microsoft's Windows OS on ARM based devices, and one of the reasons it is believed that people will be happy to use mini-PCs without Windows is that users are expected to access a lot of their data and services through remote servers - i.e. the cloud.
So it makes sense that a supplier of online services should want to strengthen its position in cloud computing, and that's exactly what Yahoo seems to be in the process of doing. Yesterday it released an open source version of Traffic Server - an application server for builders of cloud services. This joins Yahoo's own distribution of Hadoop as a Yahoo donation to the Apache Software Foundation.
"We see Traffic Server as an essential building block for cloud computing, and at Yahoo!, it's integral to our edge services, on-line storage and cloud serving," said Shelton Shugar, SVP of cloud computing at Yahoo.
"The open-sourcing of Traffic Server is representative of our company-wide commitment to sharing technology innovation with the open source community, as well as our broader intention to continue to open source our cloud technologies as they mature. By releasing an open source version of Traffic Server, we are sharing a core piece of technology with the open-source world, while also signalling our intention to build a community of developers to take it to the next level."
