Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.

Today Yahoo! officially introduced their "open strategy" platform, Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform consists of three development components, the Yahoo! Application Platform, the Yahoo! Social Platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

According to avid Yahoo'er, Amanda Kerik, Yahoo seems to have developed a policy of censoring answers in their "Yahoo! Answers" service, if that answer contains a suggestion to use Open Source alternatives to Microsoft software.

One of the interesting aspects of Microsoft's long-running pursuit of Yahoo has been the potential knock-on effects for open source. Although the company doesn't make much of the fact, it uses a lot of free software, and has helped open source projects by employing some of the top hackers.

After several months of discussion and speculation, the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout deal is apparently off. At least, that's what both Microsoft and Yahoo announced over the weekend. There is some speculation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his announcement in order to topple Yahoo's share price, in order to make another offer at a lower price.

Pidgin is a popular open source client for yahoo messenger and other IM protocols. Yahoo recently updated their client and older versions of pidgin will be unable to login to yahoo. Learn how to do a work around.

One of the most surprising things about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is that if successful it will make Microsoft one of the two or three largest users of open source software in the world. Google is certainly the largest. The National Security Agency may or may not be second (only the spooks know for sure), but if it is then by my estimate that would make Yahoo the third.

When Yahoo acquired Zimbra in September 2007, some Zimbra backers worried Yahoo would mismanage the open source email asset. Fast forward to the present, and some Zimbra proponents have gone from concern to outright panic over Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (and, by attachment, Zimbra).

If you want to get your hands on an open source version of some of Google's core technologies, maybe you should ask Yahoo.