Twitter, like many other social media giants, has long been making heavy use of the open-source software. Now, the company has paid $15,000 for a silver membership at the Linux Foundation. The formal membership in the Linux Foundation has reiterated Twitter’s support for open source software, and that the company is ready to fight for it.
Numerous open-source tools are being used by the micro-blogging website. These tools run the very systems of Twitter’s data centers. For instance, Twitter uses MySQL to store tweets and also makes use of Memcached. It has also developed its own forks of both these tools, and these forks are publicly available.
Moreover, the company also makes use of tools such as Lucene, Hadoop, Cassandra, Pig and others. Over the past, Twitter has launched a number of open-source projects. These include the project Iago, which is basically a testing load generator for the services. Another one is Zipkin which is essentially a distributed tracing system.
Twitter’s continued commitment to open-source is still commendable. And, joining the Linux Foundation as a silver member is a sign of that.
Linux Foundation is one of the key organizations which strive for the development of open-source software. The company relies on the funding of numerous IT giants who are eager to become a board member in order to tap into the huge open-source resource repository and, in the long run, contribute back to it.
The fact that Twitter joined Linux Foundation shows “just how important Linux is becoming to so many of these large scale-out Internet companies that essentially run on Linux and are working to build their infrastructure almost entirely on open source software”, said the Executive Director of Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin.
Courtesy: Arstechnica
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