Twitter Joins The Linux Foundation To Fight For Open Source

[Chirag Gohel]

Saturday, August 25, 2012:  The ability of Linux to be heavily tweaked is the reason why Twitter is all praises for Linux. Twitter is the new name among the list of recent joinees of The Linux Foundation. The official announcement about the same is likely to come on Tuesday.  Speaking to The Linux Foundation, Chris Aniszczyk, open source manager, Twitter, said, “Linux supports Twitter majorly and is our technology backbone. Twitter has thousands machines that run all kinds of services running a customized version of Linux. Linux is an an obvious preference because it gives us the ability to innovate faster because it is flexible and can be customised based on our needs. There is large and mature development community that moves the kernel forward."

"The latest Linux Development Report reveals that over 7,800 developers from 800 different companies are contributing to Linux. We, at Twitter, use customised kernel by adding some patches including enhanced core dump functionality, UnionFS support and the ability to allow TCP congestion window to be set on a socket basis. We are also looking to further customize the kernel for optimising our production environment and contributing some of the work upstream," he added.

Here are a few examples of how Twitter consumers open source software:

MySQL is used for primary storage of Tweets. The developers at Twitter develop their MySQL fork in the open which is collaborated with the upstream community.

Twitter uses a variety of Apache Projects within its infrastructure to provide services like analytics and search. Twitter team also contributes back to these projects and have sponsored the Apache Software Foundation.

Twitter also produces a variety of open source software too like Iago, Zipkin and Scalding. 

Diksha  P Gupta, EFYTIMES News Network