Microsoft cleared to commit code to Apache
Few will have noticed, but Microsoft's Jim Kellerman just announced that he and a Microsoft colleague have "been cleared to contribute patches again" to Apache, and specifically to the Hadoop project.
This is great news for Microsoft, and I think for open source generally. It means that Microsoft just became an open-source insider and may find it more difficult to sling mud as an open-source outsider in the future.
It's also good to have Microsoft's heft behind the Hadoop project, an incredibly cool open-source project that got additional help from CloudEra, a new open-source company helmed by former Sleepycat CEO Mike Olson that promises to help companies tap into the power of Hadoop. Who cares about Hadoop? Any Web developer that wants to "write and run applications that process huge amounts of data."
Microsoft gets deep into open source and Olson comes out of retirement. This is turning out to be a Very Great Day.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
