Dare Obasanjo spots a slashdot thread that captures another one of the big aspects of the proposed MS/Yahoo deal: the outcome for multiple open source efforts:

A consolidation of the Microsoft and Yahoo networks could shift a massive amount of infrastructure from open source technologies to Microsoft platforms.Microsoft said that "eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity." Yahoo has been a major player in several open soruce projects. Most of Yahoo's infrastructure runs on FreeBSD, and the lead developer of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, works as an engineer at Yahoo. Yahoo has also been a major contributor to Hadoop, an open source technology for distributed computing. Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com] has more on the infrastructure implications.

Going back to my earlier post, this is exactly why there's going to be internecine warfare: the Yahoo staff ihas one technology stack, and the Microsoft side has another one. There will be enormous pressure to rewrite into the MS stack, but - the Yahoo side will resist, citing perfectly valid business cases along the lines of "if it's not broke, don't fix it".

If this goes through, there's going to be a lot of chaos, and it won't end quickly. Various analysts, including ones I respect, see the potential upside; few are seeing the iceberg under the water line.

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