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Yahoo! is a major sponsor of Hadoop, an open source project aimed at understanding and replicating 'Google's techniques for storing and processing large amounts of data' across a huge network. This support does not 'enhance Yahoo!'s reputation as a technology innovator.' Hadoop's founder, Doug Cutting, now works for Yahoo!, and argues that open source is not meant to provide 'the special sauce' but rather to provide 'commodity systems.' Previously Cutting worked at Excite and Xerox PARC, as well as founding projects pursuing an open source platform for search, which eventually led to Hadoop. Though Google has not released its source code, it had published academic papers on its technology presumably with the knowledge that other IT professionals would attempt to replicate it. Yahoo! has not publicly declared its motives for its interest in open source Google alternatives. Hadoop includes a version of MapReduce, Google's distributed computing environment for dividing and assigning tasks, written in Java. Each computation is divided into two stages: map, involving thousands of computers, and reduce to sort and merge the results. Distributed computing is not as central to Yahoo! as it is to Google. Yahoo! does use Hadoop to analyze data for market research and product planning, and has tested the system with up to 2,000 computers working in tandem.
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