When I was in California last week I heard lots of worried talk about where open source is going to find profits in a cloud-based world.
After all, the argument goes, if Amazon wants to run databases in a cloud like EC2, it just downloads a community edition for some open source database and does its own support. One customer, scaled, with free software, means nothing for the developers.
But it's becoming increasingly clear that one cloud won't rule them all. Clouds like those of Amazon and Google and Microsoft are cool, they're cheap as chips, they actually improve the efficiency of hardware that itself just keeps getting better and cheaper.
Still, Hey, you, get off of my cloud. Corporations, governments, banks, lots of people who've put billions over the years into data centers, they're not all going to dump all that and rent. They want their own clouds.
Open source vendors are happy to provide the tools, but how remains the question. There are, in fact, many tools, and open source companies have always found the most success in sponsoring a single product. That game of third-party support for open source came and went. The word for it was FAIL.
Now Cloudera is offering another way. The company originally founded around Apache's Hadoop project is now offering to bundle support for a bunch of related projects — all the stuff that makes Hadoop valuable — into what you might call a Hadoop stack.
Projects like Hive (a SQL-like query language developed at Facebook), Pig (a lower-level language developed by Yahoo!), HBase (a distributed database), Sqoop (a MySQL connector built by Cloudera), Flume (a data-loading infrastructure developed by Cloudera), Oozie (the Hadoop workflow system), Hue (a graphical user interface), and Zookeeper (a means of juggling distributed services from a central location) will all be run separately, from a development standpoint. But they will be integrated by Cloudera and offered as a package.
The idea is important. Projects concentrate on one system. Companies build ecosystems. By turning a collection of projects into an ecosystem — by integrating them so they work well together — an open source company like Cloudera provides real value worth paying for.
That's how clouds go from being an innovation into a market sector. But it's also how open source can develop new business models to keep money coming in, even as the number of systems consolidate around the cloud model.
