Inspired by Red Hat’s Commercial Success, Cloudera Goes 100 Percent Open Source

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Over the course of the next six months, Cloudera plans to consolidate and transition all its projects currently licensed under closed source licenses to open source licenses.

 US-based software company Cloudera has announced a new licensing model that will make its entire product portfolio available under open-source terms, just like Hortonworks, its one-time Hadoop rival that it acquired in January.

The new model aligns the licensing models previously used by Hortonworks and Cloudera with some new changes.

“Prior to the merger, the two companies distributed their products under somewhat different open source licensing models.  Aligning the two models was one of the last items on our merger to-do list,” Cloudera executives Charles Zedlewski and Arun Murthy wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday.

Cloudera wants to emulate emulating the successful commercial open source business model of Red Hat.

“The subscription agreement will cover the terms of support and maintenance, as well as access to the latest updates and security patches. In this way, we will align Cloudera’s open source strategy as closely as possible with the market leading open source strategy developed by Red Hat and accepted globally by thousands of businesses,” the Cloudera executives announced.

The company plan to roll out the new, aligned open source licensing model in the coming months.

All of Cloudera’s products to be available free of charge

Over the course of the next six months, Cloudera plans to consolidate and transition all its projects currently licensed under closed source licenses to open source licenses.

This means components such as Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator and Cloudera Data Science Workbench will eventually be available free of charge.

In addition, the new licensing model will also apply to all new releases including HDP, CDH as well as the upcoming Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).

Cloudera will distribute its software using one of two OSI approved licenses: The Apache License, Version 2, or the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 (“AGPL”). If customers want technical support, they can pay Cloudera for a subscription.

However, all of the projects that are currently developed by the Apache Software Foundation will continue under the ASF, the company stated.

The company will roll out its updated subscription agreement and software distribution model starting in September 2019. By February 2020, it plans to have all of its projects transitioned to open source, licensing them under the AGPL.

 

1 COMMENT

  1. first of all thanks to Cloudera and also Charles and Arun for this blog post, nice thought of Open Source licensing.

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