MS Releases Open Source Alternative To BigTable 163
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."
Re:really? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
Lets see (Score:4, Informative)
100 bucks a copy for os licenses x 50K boxes...hmmmm no thanks..
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.)
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.
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
Re:did they use hot chicks to promote it? (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.
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.
Re:Which license? (Score:1, Informative)
The product is called Hbase [apache.org]/ Apache license, so it is open source.
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.
Re:.Net? (Score:2, Informative)
And how open-source the MS Big Table will be? You can download it and use in your cluster or single PC?
apache license 2.0
imo better than gpl.
Re:Money? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, but did it cost Microsoft any *money*?
Vista. It cost MS its reputation. Before then, MS, in the non-tech world was considered pretty decent. Sure, XP was as insecure as heck, froze up randomly, etc. But it was decent enough. Then came Vista. By being totally committed to proprietary designs, MS managed to release a train wreck which cost them customers, their reputation, and many man-hours on the redoing of Vista.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. They took an open source foundation (BSD), added a nice GUI, some compatibility, and they got a pretty decent OS once they worked out a few issues. All this for a much lower cost then developing a new beginning for Mac OS 9 totally in-house.
Re:I lol'd (Score:1, Informative)
It's only obvious you haven't heard about ninja anything. They are that much better at concealing themselves :)
Re:really? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:really? (Score:2, Informative)
Since when were Windows 2000 and 7's network stack re-written?
Of course it's probably in there somewhere, but it'd be such a small percentage that it'd be basically insignificant. I'd doubt that any non-basic code would survive two rewrites (NT3.5 and Vista).
There's probably a compat struct somewhere for the five apps that ran on NT3.1 and required TCP/IP (or STACKS, the platform SpiderTCP ran on) but other than that, I wouldn't expect much.
Re:Microsoft open source Open Source (Score:2, Informative)
They are allowing developers that work for a company they purchased (so the developers work for Microsoft) to continue contributing to software released under the Apache 2.0 license.
No matter what the rest of the company is doing, this activity is exactly the "Open Source" that you seem to think it isn't.