OStatic

Open-source fans will be delighted to read a new survey published by O'Reilly Media, and announced at their annual Open Source Conference (OSCon), taking place this week in Portland, Oregon. Their report, called Open Source in the Enterprise, details the ways in which open source is being adopted by large organizations. The report indicates that overall usage of open source is growing, pointing to download statistics from Sourceforge along with usage trends inside of companies.

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers. In a blog posting announcing the sponsorship, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy and head of its open source software lab, indicated that this demonstrates Microsoft's interest in working along with Apache on many projects. At the same time, he wrote that this does not mean Microsoft is turning its back on proprietary software, including its IIS Web server.

Ever wonder how YouTube got started and scaled up to being such a huge repository of video? There are quite a few surprises in the story, as you'll see if you check in on NewTeeVee's post Early YouTube Engineer Tells All. It features video of Cuong Do, an early software engineer at YouTube who is now a manager in the site's engineering group. Open sourcers will be particularly interested in how YouTube employs memcached and Apache along its chain of under-the-hood applications. Check it out.