Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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When it comes to web server software, Apache has been king of the hill for a long time. It currently has about 54% of the market. This is followed by Microsoft’s IIS, with about 24% of the market. Then, surprisingly, a new contender has started to rise, and it’s coming out of Russia: nginx (pronounced “engine x”).

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Have you ever wondered about those key moments in time that made open source software such an immense success story? We just did, and here below is our list.

We have narrowed the list down to what we consider the nine most important events that shaped open source into what it is today. The focus is on events that propelled open source forward and resulted in a rich inheritance, or events that strengthened the reputation of open source software in the eyes of the public.

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Wordpress has risen to be a powerhouse on the Internet that now dominates the blogosphere. It was started by the (now) 25-year-old Matt Mullenweg. Last week he was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. On the show Matt revealed that Wordpress has such a strong presence on the Internet that at least one in three Americans online have visited a Wordpress blog in the last month.

Wordpress lets you use thousands of powerful plugins that complement and extend the platform in a variety of ways. I have scoured the Wordpress Plugin Directory to find the very best plugins to share with you in this post.

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Last week Google finally unveiled their much-talked-about Chrome OS, and subsequently worked the tech community into a frenzy. The operating system certainly lived up to Google’s initial promises of being browser-centric – it is basically just the Chrome web browser atop a custom Linux kernel.

Chrome OS is a momentous step towards making the fuzzy concepts of cloud computing more of a distinct reality. What follows are a few reasons why I think it matters, and how it will change the computing landscape by bringing us closer to the cloud than ever before.

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Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.

That might lead you to think that Perl is dying, but as it turns out, it’s still used by plenty of websites out there, including some pretty big hitters.

Here are some of the more popular sites that use Perl extensively today.

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The rapidly changing nature of the Web makes it necessary for web developers to constantly be on the lookout for new, shiny tools. This post will hopefully show you some cool tools you didn’t already know about.

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Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.

While Twitter has a huge user base, it isn’t the only microblogging service on the Web. One of Twitter’s competitors that you should pay attention to is identi.ca. It combines the best, and occasionally the worst, of the microblogging and open source worlds.

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When most people think of Open Source, they think of the big, highly-publicized projects like Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. But for every high-profile open source project, there are dozens of lesser-known projects. Just pay a visit to SourceForge if you don’t believe me.

Simply because certain projects don’t grab the attention that the big names do doesn’t mean that they don’t merit a closer look. In fact, a number deserve far more notice than they get.

Let’s take a look at three open source projects that any webmaster or web developer should keep an eye on. They just might change the way you work.

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