MapR has declined the invitation to participate in the Open Data Platform (ODP) after careful consideration, as noted in a recent blog post by John Schroeder, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Schroeder claims that the Open Data Platform is redundant with the governance provided by the Apache Software Foundation, that it purports to “solve” Hadoop-related problems that do not require solving and that it fails to accurately define the core of the Open Data Platform as it relates to Hadoop. With respect to software governance, Schroeder notes that the Apache Software Foundation has done well to steward the development of Apache Hadoop as elaborated below:
The Apache Software Foundation has done a wonderful job governing Hadoop, resulting in the Hadoop standard in which applications are interoperable among Hadoop distributions. Apache governance is based on a meritocracy that doesn’t require payment to participate or for voting rights. The Apache community is vibrant and has resulted in Hadoop becoming ubiquitous in the market in only a few short years.
Here, Schroeder credits the Apache Software Foundation with creating a Hadoop ecosystem in which Hadoop-based applications interoperate with one another and wherein the governance structure is based on a meritocracy that does not mandate monetary contributions in order to garner voting rights. In addition, the blog post observes that whereas the Open Data Platform defines the core of Apache Hadoop as MapReduce, YARN, Ambari and HDFS, other frameworks such as “Spark and Mesos, are gaining market share” and stand to complicate ODP’s definition of the core of Hadoop. Meanwhile, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson explained why Cloudera also declined to join the Open Data Platform by noting that Hadoop “won because it’s open source” and that the partnership between Pivotal and Hortonworks was “antithetical to the open source model and the Apache way.” Given that 75% of Hadoop implementations use either MapR or Cloudera, ODP looks set to face some serious challenges despite support from IBM, Pivotal and Hortonworks, although the precise impact of the schism over the Open Data Platform on the Hadoop community remains to be seen.
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