Big Data's Invisible Open Source Community 49
itwbennett writes "Hadoop, Hive, Lucene, and Solr are all open source projects, but if you were expecting the floors of the Strata Conference to be packed with intense, boostrapping hackers you'd be sorely disappointed. Instead, says Brian Proffitt, 'community' where Big Data is concerned is 'acknowledged as a corporate resource', something companies need to contribute back to. 'There is no sense of the grass-roots, hacker-dominated communities that were so much a part of the Linux community's DNA,' says Proffitt."
So... I read the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
And I have to ask...
What was the point of the article? That the trade show is like every trade show ever?
Really, I'll write a report the next time I go to EASTEC and whine about the lack of "Makers" (in the geek culture sense of the word) among the vendors of Big Machinery.
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BMO
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent poster nailed it.
Try to get support from "the community" when you discover a bug in a code path that nobody except you encounters. Suddenly the community becomes very small indeed.
There just aren't that many geeks out there who handle petabyte datasets. Prove me wrong, dear reader.
Scratching Itches (Score:2, Interesting)
A big part of the grass-roots movement that Linux and other open-source projects benefit from comes about because hackers (in the good sense) contribute to software that they themselves want or need. There probably aren't many programmers that want (or can afford) to store and analyze petabytes of data in their free time. That's important to corporations, though, so I suspect that's why you see primarly corporate interests in open-source Big Data projects.
Re:Sorry (Score:2, Interesting)
http://adequacy.org/stories/2001.10.2.33542.4010.html [adequacy.org]