Well a bit of it
While Microsoft's official
line is that open source is a bit like syphilis, the way you get it is nice but
you will wish you hadn't, it seems that its Kumo search team are using it
anyway.
Microsoft's new Kumo search technology is filled to the brim with
open source code and officially the search team, formerly Powerset, "tr(ies) to
use open-source software, if it is available." According to the teams
description of its work, instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces
of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene
subproject that is a framework for running data-intensive applications on large
clusters of commodity hardware.
Unfortunately, there was no Hadoop equivalent
to Google's BigTable storage engine so 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). The theory is that the Big Table
needs to be developed and it isn't part of the Powerset "secret sauce" so why
not hand it over to the Open Source community to help.
The move is starting
to be seen as a change in Microsoft's attitude to Open Source. While Redmond is
not that happy with it, it is very keen on consuming open-source software and
embedding it into its proprietary products. Generally the feel in Redmond is
starting to be that it wasted a lot of years treating Open Source like a dose of
the clap and much more cash would have been saved if it had embraced such code
early.
Its rival, Google, is a big fan of Open Source.