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MS Releases Open Source Alternative To BigTable
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat May 09, 2009 05:11 PM
from the devil-puts-on-gloves dept.
from the devil-puts-on-gloves dept.
gollito writes in with news that Microsoft has released an open source alternative to Google's BigTable file system, which is used on large distributed computer clusters. Matt Asay writes for CNet: "I also believe that Microsoft's fear-mongering around open source cost it years of productivity and quality gains that it could have been delivering to customers through open source. I hope that reign of ignorance is over."
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Wow... just wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow... just wow. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Are you trying to say swine flu didn't change EVERYTHING, Brian?
Is this what you're trying to say?
Huh?
Huh?
Re:Wow... just wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Only if that pig is seated in a chair in Ballmer's office.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yep, pigs flu... I mean, flew. Bad joke, I know, I know.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or this is Microsoft trying to hurt Google because they fear them more than open source
I lol'd (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this really news, or just another opportunity for us to have everyones favorite slashdot debate?
Re:I lol'd (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I lol'd (Score:5, Funny)
Rubbish
emacs is clearly superior
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Cool! I just installed [emacs] on my machine. Do you know where I can find a decent text editor for it?
It comes with one built in.
M-x vi-mode
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in a mathematical sense, emacs is strictly superior to vi--you can implement vi in emacs, but not the other way around!
really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:really? (Score:4, Informative)
Do some real research and stop proliferating garbage. The SpiderTCP stack used in NT3.1 was licensed from Spider Systems, who obtained and modified the BSD code, which was distributed under the BSD license. SpiderTCP is not and has not ever been open source, even if it was based on open source code.
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Which license? (Score:5, Interesting)
So... the linked article says the Kumo search team (the ones who develop the FS) USE open source. But I can nowhere see that the FS is released as open source. A citation would be good, especially since the used license would be quit important.
Re:Which license? (Score:5, Informative)
So... the linked article says the Kumo search team (the ones who develop the FS) USE open source. But I can nowhere see that the FS is released as open source. A citation would be good, especially since the used license would be quit important.
You should check your glasses and re-RTFA. Two points there:
1) The Kumo search team did not develop the FS. They've used the one Apache Hadoop [apache.org] (guess the license).
2) The Kumo search team have implemented a BigTable analog on top of Hadoop FS, and that's what they've open sourced. The result [apache.org] is a subproject of Hadoop now (again, guess the license).
Also, this isn't obvious from TFA itself, but looking at the sources that it references, this is really old news: the blog post they link to is from 2007. It is also before Powerset was bought by Microsoft (that happened in 2008), so the relevance of all this to Microsoft policies is unclear.
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It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:5, Insightful)
Google doesn't sell/license BigTable in any way. It's used internally. I fail to see how it's possible to release an alternative to something which can't be acquired in any form.
Not completely correct. You can use BigTable right now. There are Google AppEngine APIs that can access BigTable. You just can't use it without using Google's servers, that's all.
If, at this point, you still can't see why it's completely obvious why Microsoft would write an alternative to BigTable and open source it, all I can say you haven't been paying attention.
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Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll note that Google aren't opening up their crown jewels: you can't just download their raw web page index and do your own thing with it. Since they're not in the software business, they can afford to give away or open their software tools. Since Microsoft are in the software business, that hurts them.
Now there's an interesting symmetry here. Being (primarily) in the software business should mean that actual content and databases isn't too important for Microsoft. If they wanted to hurt Google, they would open up their raw msnsearch indexes and other useful content databases. That would hurt Google, because people could download massive competing data collections and create their own competing search engines without the huge resource investment in crawler farms etc.
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Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:5, Informative)
Using Google's AppEngine, you can use BigTable.. so while you can't install it on your own servers, you can still write software that uses it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Using Google's AppEngine, you can use BigTable.. so while you can't install it on your own servers, you can still write software that uses it.
Which means that your appliance that uses BigTable needs continuous access to the Internet.
Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable (Score:5, Funny)
Which means that your appliance that uses BigTable needs continuous access to the Internet.
What!? This is absolutely outrageous~! None of my servers have internet access!
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needs an expert opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
don't count on it, you know about embrace/extend/extinguish?
Crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Article says that they "use open source". Doesn't mean they give ANYTHING back at all, because they are not distributing it, thus the HEADLINE is so false it's unbelievable.
For instance, say they took even a GPL'd piece of software, extended it to add marvellous and important new features and then KEPT IT IN HOUSE. They can still use it, still claim it's "open source" but they NEVER have to let anyone but themselves see that code.
It's bad editing, bad reviewing, bad summarising and just outright lying. There is nothing "Open" about anything being done here apart from the software that MS chose to use.
Re:Crap (Score:5, Informative)
Note also that while Google has a bigTable, they have not released it as open source (as far as I can tell, but they do sell it as a webservice). So there may be some desire to undercut Google here with this move.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My post was accurate in this case, but I admit sometimes they
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Crap (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you're not even close.
A company called Powerset developed the open-source alternative to BigTable called HBase. This was developed as an Apache Software Foundation project under the Apache license.
Microsoft bought Powerset for a bucket of money because their search technology based of Hbase was pretty damned good. This was last year. This year, the folks behind powerset - as Microsoft employees - were given the go-ahead to continue committing to the ASF project and they continue to make it better. For what I can see, they aren't keeping anything juicy in-house.
It's honest-to-goodness MS committing to an Apache project.
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so what's the license? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
is it mentioned anywhere? I can't find it.
I was wondering the same thing. If it is just the standard MS open development model, then it is not really news. GPL on the otherhand...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's apache, which is more free than GPL.
While this is an informative post, modding it insightful is a bit trollish. If your definition of "free" means "less restricted", then it is certainly true. If your definition of "free" refers to the "free" as commonly used in "free software", then the statement is meaningless. Either it is free (gives me the 4 freedoms) or it isn't. There isn't "more" or "less".
By saying it is "more free than the GPL" you are making a distinction which is completely unnecessary in this context. The Apache license is b
More Or Less (Score:3, Insightful)
It's apache, which is more free than GPL.
More free if you want companies to be able to use the software without giving anything back to you.
Less free if you want changes to always be public for everyone forever.
I'm all for BSD style licenses in some cases that allow a company to use code without contributing changes back to anyone. But do not redefine what "free" really means just because you have an irrational fear of prophetic guys with beards.
Otherwise you are missing the whole point behind open source
Re: (Score:2)
"... the available Hadoop technology, 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)."
Since Hadoop is Apache License 2.0, presumably this extension is so too.
It is called HBase according to the cited release post [powerset.com].
Wiki:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase [apache.org]
Yahoo and Adobe seem to run it too (see PoweredBy).
Project website:
http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/ [apache.org]
Looking inside the last release tarball, it really
did they use hot chicks to promote it? (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Matt Aimonetti is a Ruby on Rails bozo:
http://merbist.com/about/ [merbist.com]
He doesn't seem to be particularly involved with CouchDB:
http://couchdb.apache.org/community/committers.html [apache.org]
I guess he was presenting information about CouchDB to the ruby community.
no surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly Microsoft is using open source as a tactical weapon here, the way companies often do against entrenched competitors.
But is this a new tactic for them? No. Back in the '90s, they competed against Netscape in the browser wars by giving away IE for free; unlike Netscape, which was hoping to eventually start charging for Navigator, Microsoft made IE part of Windows (so it was effectively free for anyone who already paid for the PC).
And Microsoft released an "Open Letter to Netscape", asking its rival to cooperate with the W3C and avoid making proprietary extensions to web protocols. As if anything else about Windows desktop development at the time was based on open standards!
Going back even further, at one point Borland International was the leading PC software tools vendor. Microsoft wanted this title for itself (remember "developers developers developers developers"), so to compete against Borland's Object Windows C++ framework, they came up with MFC. And following Borland's lead, they made MFC open source (or "shared source" or whatever. Source available).
So no, they aren't having a change of heart. They will do whatever it takes to get control of this hot market segment.
Lets see (Score:4, Informative)
100 bucks a copy for os licenses x 50K boxes...hmmmm no thanks..
Money? (Score:2)
> ...Microsoft's fear-mongering around open source cost it years of productivity and
> quality gains that it could have been delivering to customers through open source.
Yes, but did it cost Microsoft any *money*?
I'm familiar with the situation (Score:3, Funny)
And I can tell you that the entire original Register article was pulled out of author's ass. The CNet article just extended that ass pulling, Goatse style. Must be a slow news day. None of this will ever end up in Live Search. Nothing to see here, move on.
Try the Powerset demo, compare it to even current Live Search or Google. Realize that this is just Wikipedia they've managed to index, even at that quality. Scratch your head and wonder why Microsoft paid $100M for it.
HBase isn't a Microsoft product (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has allowed two of the primary HBase developers, who work at Powerset, to continue their open-source work on HBase, which is definitely cool. But to say that Microsoft is releasing this is just flat out wrong.
(Full disclosure: I am a non-Microsoft-employed HBase committer.)
Reign of ignorance? (Score:4, Funny)
I hope that reign of ignorance is over.
Lets see... Nope, Ballmer is still in charge!
HBase / Powerset (Score:2)
So completely missing from article summary and article itself is any information about the software.
This guy is just late to the party. HBase was contributed to the hadoop project by Powerset. A startup that microsoft bought.
Probably HBase (Score:3, Insightful)
None of the articles say it, but they are probably talking about HBase [apache.org]. If this is the case, this is seriously old news.
HBase was started by the Powerset guys before being acquired by Microsoft. After the acquisition there was a lot of concern in the Hadoop community about whether the Powerset guys would be allowed to continue to contribute. They have, and as far as I can tell, the community is not particularly concerned about MS's involvement.
Releases? (Score:2)
- Last july Microsoft bought Powerset, that were developing what would be the base of a semantic search engine.
- That company (before all of that) used Hadoop, and helped to build over it a BigTable-like distributed storage engine, called HBase.
- And in last october (thats Microsoft contribution to open source) Microsoft enabled the Powerset's developers that were contributing to HBase to continue their work there.
They aren't releasing any "new
Microsoft open source Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is not distributing open source software. This is not an open source product. It can't be used on multiple platforms. It can't be modified and freely distributed. It is not open source.
Microsoft does openED source where you can view the code but never use it outside of your project and never on another platform other than Windows.
Open Source was defined around 15 years ago in the attempt of ensuring that the definition for open source was long standing.
Microsoft and open source together is an oxymoron.
Microsoft claimed in 2007 that Open Source was dead and that Linux was dead. Their attempt to do this was about the time they claimed that open source violated 235 of their patents. Then they refused to state which ones even though the consumers world-wide asked for it.
They were the same company that sued TomTom and backed the company with funding for SCO to sue IBM and other linux backers.
We do not, in open source, put any trust in Microsoft nor do we let them attempt to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Open Source by closing it or limiting it. They are trying to get big business to think that the only acceptable form of open source is that which is defined by Microsoft.
Everyone should be objecting to Microsoft and this 100% of the time.
missing tag: itsatrap (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, who cares if its 'open source'.
Its only news if its Free software [gnu.org]
Thank you, but I'll store my data on *MY* server, using protocols implemented in *Free* software.
Re:.Net? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will be it attached to .Net? Probably, right?
Java more likely (since it's built on Hadoop, which uses Java).
Slighty embarrassing for microsoft, perhaps? But remember, this comes from a group that microsoft acquired, not something that has always been a part of microsoft.
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