In an interview with ITworld Doug Cutting, creator of Apache Hadoop and Apache Lucene explains how he got into open source. “The company went bankrupt and all the software was swallowed into some intellectual property black hole,” Cutting told ITworld. “Open Source seemed to offer the option to have the software that I’d written, this particular one, Lucene, live on and have the opportunity for people to use it.”
As for the creation of Hadoop itself:
I was interested in providing the world with great tools to make search engines. I was excited to be able to try to bring this technology to the world through Open Source. Google was able to come up with the ideas behind [Hadoop]. But, because of the way they were structured, they weren’t able to give it to the world, except as ideas, which is great. They could have kept it as their secret sauce, but they choose to promulgate it.
I’ve argued before that open source big data tools, like Hadoop, will be the legacy of this current tech bubble (or boom, if you prefer). Tools are being created by many startups and large companies, often for the purpose of optmizing advertising systems, but many of those tools are being made available for other non-profits, scientific researchers and other startups. It sounds like Cutting decided to release his work as open source because of similar concerns.
