Cloudera decides to become 100 percent open source

Cloudera plans to make all software open source. This is followed by the Hortonworks, which Cloudera took over in January.

Before the takeover, the two companies distributed their products under slightly different open source licensing models, according to Charles Zedlewski and Arun Murthy of Cloudera. Streamlining the two models was one of the last things on our to do list of fusion.

Cloudera already had a lot of open source software, Datanami writes. However, there were some important products of the company – namely Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator and Cloudera Data Science Workbench – that were not.

This must change over the next six months. All products, including the earlier own closed products, then become open source. This means that existing Hortonworks HDP and CDH solutions will also become available free of charge.

Subscriptions

Cloudera will therefore be making money in a different way. Although the products are free to use, a paid subscription is required for technical support.

The subscription agreement includes the terms and conditions of support and maintenance, as well as access to the latest updates and security patches, said Zedlewski and Murthy. In doing so, they maintain a strategy similar to that of the successful Red Hat model.

Two licenses

The software is distributed under one of two licenses. These are the Apache License version 2 and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. The products that were not open source before are distributed under the AGPL.

Projects now being developed by the Apache Software Foundation remain available under the ASF license. In the future, Cloudera may use other companies to develop projects.

The new subscription agreements will be rolled out as of September and all projects must be transferred to open source by February 2020.

Hortonworks

The merger between Cloudera and Hortonworks was completed in January this year. The companies themselves described that merger as an amalgamation of equals. Together, the organizations expect to generate more than $720 million in revenue from 2,500 different customers.

The new Cloudera is designed to help users manage and process their data. In addition, the company takes care of the main infrastructural challenges.