Google's Mind-Blowing Big-Data Tool Grows Open Source Twin

Mike Olson and John Schroeder shared a stage at a recent meeting of Silicon Valley's celebrated Churchill Club, and they didn't exactly see eye to eye. Both outfits deal in Hadoop -- a sweeping open source software platform based on data center technologies that underpinned the rise of Google's web-dominating search engine -- but in building their particular businesses, the two startups approached Hadoop from two very different directions. Whereas Cloudera worked closely with the open source Hadoop project to enhance the software code that's freely available to the world at large, MapR decided to rebuild the platform from the ground up, and when that was done, it sold the new code as proprietary software. The company took the Hadoop code behind closed doors, he explained, at least in part because those driving the open source project were unwilling to quickly make the changes MapR wanted to make. At the Apache Software Foundation -- the not-for-profit open source outfit that oversees Hadoop -- MapR recently proposed a project that aims to mimic Dremel, a shockingly effective data-analysis tool built and used by Google.