Tim O’Reilly thinks that Yahoo has made a major announcement for open source:

‘One of the most important announcements at Oscon last week was Yahoo!’s commitment to support Hadoop. We’ve been writing about Hadoop on radar for a while, so it’s probably not news to you that we think Hadoop is important.[…]Let me unpack the two parts of this news: hadoop as an important open source project, and Yahoo!’s involvement. On the first front, I’ve been arguing for some time that free and open source developers need to pay more attention to Web 2.0.[…]OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor.’

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