In past few days, there are many tech news which are related to open source. For example, Microsoft enables Linux on its Windows Azure cloud, Facebook open sourced its C++ library Folly and Samsung joined Linux foundation. Now more and more big companies realize the power of open source and are willing to contribute to the open source community. It will benefit not only developers but also these big companies as well.

By providing some open source libraries or projects, developer may reduce their time of development and enjoy some performance improvement from open sourced resource. Some of these open source libraries or projects are developed by a group of experienced developers in these big companies to solve some critical problems encountered by their companies. These problems may be encountered by some other companies as well. For example, Facebook open sourced its low level C++ function library for its internal use named Folly.  Folly provides functions similar to what boost and std libraries provide, including string, vector and memory allocation, bit operation etc, to fulfill large scale high performance requirements. Other companies who may have large amount of users in the future may use this library to improve their performance.

Also, the open source community provide some excellent software or applications to the public, there are many open sourced projects in the world which benefits hundreds of thousands of developers and companies, such as PHP, MySQL. Some big companies may also utilize some software developed by open source community to improve their productivity and avoid reinventing the wheel so that they can put effort on some problem which are not solved by other people. For example, In late 2011, Microsoft and HortonWorks announced they were teaming-up to port Hadoop to Windows. This is a big deal; not only did Microsoft decide to plow effort and resources into porting Hadoop to Windows, they decided to abandon their own home-grown big-data solution in the process. Microsoft’s adoption of Hadoop can only result in good things – particularly to end-users who will be able to analyze colossal datasets using familiar tools such as Excel and PowerView.

There is still a long way to go for open source, but we now can find that more and more companies embrace open source and we believe that more and more companies will join this community. This is what we want to see since sharing the good things is always a good thing.