Hortonworks, IBM, EMC Pivotal and others have announced a project called “Open Data Platform” to do … well, I’m not exactly sure what. Mainly, it sounds like:
- An attempt to minimize the importance of any technical advantages Cloudera or MapR might have.
- A face-saving way to admit that IBM’s and Pivotal’s insistence on having their own Hadoop distributions has been silly.
- An excuse for press releases.
- A source of an extra logo graphic to put on marketing slides.
Edit: Now there’s a press report saying explicitly that Hortonworks is taking over Pivotal’s Hadoop distro customers (which basically would mean taking over the support contracts and then working to migrate them to Hortonworks’ distro).
The claim is being made that this announcement solves some kind of problem about developing to multiple versions of the Hadoop platform, but to my knowledge that’s a problem rarely encountered in real life. When you already have a multi-enterprise open source community agreeing on APIs (Application Programming interfaces), what API inconsistency remains for a vendor consortium to painstakingly resolve?
Anyhow, it now seems clear that if you want to use a Hadoop distribution, there are three main choices:
- Cloudera’s flavor, whether as software (from Cloudera) or in an appliance (e.g. from Oracle).
- MapR’s flavor, as software from MapR.
- Hortonworks’ flavor, from a number of vendors, including Hortonworks, IBM, Pivotal, Teradata et al.
In saying that, I’m glossing over a few points, such as:
- There are various remote services that run Hadoop, most famously Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce.
- You could get Apache Hadoop directly, rather than using the free or paid versions of a vendor distro. But why would you make that choice, unless you’re an internet bad-ass on the level of Facebook, or at least think that you are?
- There will surely always be some proprietary stuff mixed into, for example, IBM’s BigInsights, so as to preserve at least the perception of all-important vendor lock-in.
But the main point stands — big computer companies, such as IBM, EMC (Pivotal) and previously Intel, are figuring out that they can’t bigfoot something that started out as an elephant — stuffed or otherwise — in the first place.
If you think I’m not taking this whole ODP thing very seriously, you’re right.
Related links
- It’s a bit eyebrow-raising to see Mike Olson take a “more open source than thou” stance about something, but basically his post about this news is spot-on.
- My take on Hadoop distributions two years ago might offer context. Trivia question: What’s the connection between the song that begins that post and the joke that ends it?