Aye, one real quick clarification:
I strongly believe that we should support the free
alternatives even if
they suck more at the moment, possibly enhance them and contribute them
back to the larger Hadoop & Cassandra communities.
Using DSE doesn't prohibit us from doing that. DSE has a couple of closed pieces,
most importantly CFS, which ties Hadoop and Cassandra together. We'd still be using
open source versions of those.
On Sep 25, 2012, at 2:24 PM, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:37:36AM -0400, Andrew Otto wrote:
>> Okokok. So I'm starting this thread in order to answer my big
>> question: Are we allowed to use DSE even if it is not 100% open
>> source? If the answer is an easy 'no', then our choice is easy: we
>> will use CDH4. Is it possible to get an answer to this question
>> before we go down the road of dedicating time to evaluating and
>> learning DSE?
>
> Based on your choice of words ("allowed"), I think you're looking for
> some kind of authoritative/executive decision and I'm not sure who can
> give you that.
>
> As far as my personal opinion goes, I'd hate us to see using so-called
> "Enterpise" editions and non-free (as in freedom) software. I realize we
> have a few exceptions already (incl. Oracle Java) but this is a slippery
> slope to be in. I strongly believe in free & open-source software and
> its values -- values similar to those of the free culture movement,
> which we're supposed to support.
>
> I also enjoy the freedoms on a daily basis, incl. studying the code
> that we use to understand the software and the bugs I'm finding as well
> as fixing those bugs with no EULA restrictions or binaries to fiddle
> with. We're also interacting with the communities of said software,
> giving them feedback and patches and getting "support" for free, without
> needing friends or special company relations (or paid contracts). Yes,
> on a *daily* basis, I can think of numerous examples.
>
I strongly believe that we should support the free
alternatives even if
they suck more at the moment, possibly enhance them and contribute them
back to the larger Hadoop & Cassandra communities.
>
> As a final note and as I mentioned at the meeting yesterday, we
> currently have no infrastructure to support the use of proprietary
> software: our repositories (apt, puppet etc.) are public and we're
> effectively redistributing everything that we put there, which is going
> to class with a proprietary license. But that's probably a smaller,
> one-off cost of setting something up for that.
>
> Best,
> Faidon