
MS Embraces Elephant of Open Source (Hadoop) - FrancescoRizzi
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/microsoft-and-hadoop/
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jcromartie
The article doesn't mention one of the most interesting aspects: Hadoop is
Java.

It seems like Microsoft has had a policy of not touching Java with a ten foot
pole for some time now. At least, since .NET came out, they've been pretty
proactively anti-Java.

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burgerbrain
Probably has something to do with this:

 _"Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for
incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2] It was also named in the
United States v. Microsoft antitrust civil actions, as an implementation of
Microsoft's Embrace, extend and extinguish strategy. In 2001, Microsoft
settled the lawsuit with Sun and discontinued its Java implementation"_

Glad to see they're acting more mature these days.

~~~
rbanffy
> Glad to see they're acting more mature these days.

They still intend to port Hadoop to Windows. There is little to prevent
extending it.

~~~
bunderbunder
And I'm sure they will. . . but lately Microsoft seems to have grown up and
learned to not create incompatible extensions. Perhaps they're finally
starting to realize that nobody really loves them, so if they refuse to be
nice to other children then they'll just get kicked out of the schoolyard.
(Ballmer and upper management may not have, but they're facing the real
possibility of a mutiny right now.) So it'll hopefully just end up being the
kind of situation where if you switch platforms you'll lose some of the bells
and whistles that were provided in a library on the old platform. Just like
what would happen if you switch from one open-source platform to another.

What concerns me more is:

> the company is providing “connectors” for moving data between the two.

Microsoft loves to sink a lot of time into gee-whiz crap that lets their MVCs
throw together gee-whiz crap using GUI tools without ever writing any code.
They love it so much that they often waste all their effort on that stuff
without bothering to get the fundamentals in order, and the end result is
unusable garbage like much of ADO.NET and early versions of Entity Framework.
That one sentence makes me fear more of the same old garbage: We'll get a port
of Hadoop that comes with a plethora of toys in the System.DraggyDroppy
namespace for impressing the suits, but is crippled by a broken set of bridge
libraries for the programmers.

Which is fine. A Windows port of Hadoop isn't really necessary. We can just
keep using REST or whatever to keep the Windows servers talking to the servers
that do actual work, and Microsoft can keep chasing its own tail while it
slides into irrelevance, and everyone can be happy.

~~~
rbanffy
> We'll get a port of Hadoop that comes with a plethora of toys in the
> System.DraggyDroppy namespace for impressing the suits

Sadly, for programmers who work where the impressionable suits reign, it's
usually the suits who pick the tools their underlings will have to use to
assemble whatever was conceived in the demos. They'll end up having to deploy
Hadoop on Windows 8 Server and talk to it using the vile offspring of Clippy
and Hadoop that lives under System.DraggyDroppy.

~~~
bunderbunder
And yet the suits wonder why there is such a shortage of competent developers
who are willing to work in .NET.

~~~
rbanffy
A lot of things can be utterly incomprehensible to the suits. We have to be
patient with them.

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naner
_The company is now working to port the Hadoop platform to Windows — it was
built for use atop Linux — and Doug Leland, general manager of product
management for SQL Server, told Wired that the company plans to eventually
release its work back to the open source community._

Haha, some things never change. A code dump of major changes developed in
isolation. I'm sure the Hadoop commuity will love that.

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alperakgun
I m still waiting for the microsoft linux distro.

~~~
mariuz
That is officially called suse
[http://blogs.computerworld.com/17416/who_really_bought_novel...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/17416/who_really_bought_novell_microsoft)
if you want to buy "protection"

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ArturoVM
It's really great to see Microsoft moving on to embracing change, first WP7
and now this. A tendency and a positive attitude towards evolving the company
is noticable.

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vinodkd
but what about dryad?

