Microsoft buying Yahoo
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008There is uproar in many Open Source circles that Microsoft might be buying Yahoo. Yahoo reportedly runs on a predominantly FreeBSD platform and Microsoft would likely change this as they did when they bought Hotmail to run on their own proprietary operating system.
Whilst this deal is almost certainly a blow for Open Source I don’t think it is that much of a big deal. There are plenty of large successful companies running their core systems on Open Source - I know, I’ve worked on countless numbers of them. Yahoo gradually moving to Windows will take an extremely long time. Firstly because Windows and Microsoft technology isn’t built for use at this kind of scale and secondly there will be a huge amount of legacy at Yahoo that is tied to their platform. If it weren’t a PR nightmare for Microsoft running their platforms on Open Source then it would make much more economic and technical sense to leave the systems at Yahoo the way they are.
Anyway I’m happy this is happening it is about time Google had some competition in the search space. Search hasn’t moved on since 2001 when Google reached tipping point as the dominant search engine.