Obviously, this is the top story on all the tech news sites this morning. My favorite take so far has been from a post on Slashdot entitled Implications for open source which is excerpted below
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.
I listened in on the conference call and although the highlighted quote is paraphrased it is similar to what I remember raising my eyebrows at when I heard it over the phone, given my day job.
What a day to not be going into work...