The watchtowers trained on the latest round of Microsoft-Yahoo talks on a search and advertising partnership report that they have finally become "meaningful" in the words of one source and could produce an actual contract in a few weeks.

AllThingsDigital, the key observation post, claims that the deal they're talking about has Yahoo taking over search and recession-hit display ad sales and Microsoft building the search and display ad-serving technology for both of them. It also says Yahoo would be able to fire Microsoft if Microsoft screws up.

Now as it happens, Kumo, Microsoft's next-generation search engine, which could debut early next month, uses Hadoop to generate its search index.

That should make Yahoo feel right at home considering Yahoo created the open source distributed computing platform based in turn on Google MapReduce widgetry and Powerset, the open source operation Microsoft bought last year that's doing Komo, also ran up HBase, the open source knockoff of Google's Big Table storage system.

The Register cracks that Komo will be the first product that Microsoft "ships" that's based on open source. It's not all open source of course. It also uses proprietary technologies like Xerox PARC's XLE ranking algorithms.