Concurrent’s Chris Wensel: The Open Source Path Is a Rocky Road
By Jack M. Germain LinuxInsider
July 2nd 2013
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Concurrents-Chris-Wensel-The-Open-Source-Path-Is-a-Rocky-Road-78398.html#sthash.JnrHmu3b.dpuf
“I want the same clout as Oracle. I just don’t want that same infrastructure as Oracle. Open sourcing is a great way to teach people how to write code, see how things work, and get contributions and get people to trust it. It is marketing as well, however. It is a lot of things. Just one thing is missing: It is not a very clean way to make money.”
Big Data and open source software may be the next great unholy alliance in computing’s current promised land, but open source is a broken business model that needs a better vehicle for supporting projects such as programming suites that build database applications.
So argues Chris Wensel, founder and CTO of Concurrent. Wensel started the company in 2008 to focus on the open-source Cascading Project, a framework that he created to better work with Big Data applications.
Wensel quickly discovered that he was part of a bad news / good news scenario. The bad news was that he began his company too early. The good news is the Big Data market is now growing.
Big Data is the process of collecting and analyzing huge volumes of structured and unstructured data. The data sets are so large that they defy handling with traditional database and software techniques.
Cascading is an open-source framework — Java library and runtime — that enables developers to simply develop rich enterprise-grade data analytics and data management applications. The application can be deployed and managed across a variety of Apache Hadoop computing environments on which database apps typically run.
Cascading was named by InfoWorld as the 2012 Best Open Source Software Winner. Wensel, meanwhile, is also the author of Scale Unlimited Apache Hadoop BootCamp, the first commercial Apache Hadoop training course.
In this interview, LinuxInsider talks to Wensel about the challenges of working with Big Data and the hurdles posed by open source software.
Read the entire interview here – http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Concurrents-Chris-Wensel-The-Open-Source-Path-Is-a-Rocky-Road-78398.html#sthash.JnrHmu3b.dpuf