Twitter To Sponsor Open-Source Development

Twitter will officially sponsor the open-source developer community Apache Software Foundation (ASF), as announced on the Twitter Engineering blog yesterday.

A spokesman for the company called sponsoring ASF “the right thing to do”. Twitter has also hinted it might support other open-source projects in the future.

The nice blue bird

The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralised community of open-source developers. Its projects include Apache HTTP Server, Hadoop, Open Office (earlier developed by Sun Microsystems) and countless others.

“Many projects at Twitter rely on open source technologies, and as we evolve as a company, our commitment to open source continues to increase,” said Chris Aniszczyk, the spokesman for the Twitter Open Source Office.

For example, Twitter is extensively using Apache Mesos – a cluster management tool that allows sharing resources between several frameworks, or even several instances of the same framework. It was developed inside the ASF Incubator, and is yet to achieve an official release version.

Within Twitter, Mesos runs on hundreds of production machines and makes it easier to execute clustered jobs that do everything from running services to handling the analytics workload.

“We have a long history of contributing to Apache projects, including not only Mesos, but also Cassandra, Hadoop, Mahout, Pig and more,” said Aniszczyk.

“As Twitter grows, we look to further our commitment to the success of the ASF and other open source organisations,” he added.

Starting today, we are sponsoring The Apache Foundation. We look forward to contributing more and increasing our commitment to @TheASF — Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) April 19, 2012

Twitter is posing as one of the nicer companies in IT today. On Tuesday, it introduced the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), an initiative which will help its engineers and designers to retain some control over their patented works.

The company has also promised to use its patents for defence only, saying that offensive litigation slows down innovation.

At the same time, Twitter recently begun censoring its tweets on a country-by-country basis, which caused outrage and protests among users. In addition, the company’s sustainability strategy was criticised by Greenpeace, after it came near the bottom of the table in this month’s “How Clean is your Cloud?” report.

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