On 15/07/2011 18:06, Arun C Murthy wrote:
Apache Hadoop is a volunteer driven, open-source project. The contributors to
Apache Hadoop, both individuals and folks across a diverse set of
organizations, are committed to driving the project forward and making timely
releases - see discussion on hadoop-0.23 with a raft newer features such as
HDFS Federation, NextGen MapReduce and plans for HA NameNode etc.
As with most successful projects there are several options for commercial
support to Hadoop or its derivatives.
However, Apache Hadoop has thrived before there was any commercial support
(I've personally been involved in over 20 releases of Apache Hadoop and
deployed them while at Yahoo) and I'm sure it will in this new world order.
We, the Apache Hadoop community, are committed to keeping Apache Hadoop 'free',
providing support to our users and to move it forward at a rapid rate.
Arun makes a good point which is that the Apache project depends on
contributions from the community to thrive. That includes
-bug reports
-patches to fix problems
-more tests
-documentation improvements: more examples, more on getting started,
troubleshooting, etc.
If there's something lacking in the codebase, and you think you can fix
it, please do so. Helping with the documentation is a good start, as it
can be improved, and you aren't going to break anything.
Once you get into changing the code, you'll end up working with the head
of whichever branch you are targeting.
The other area everyone can contribute on is testing. Yes, Y! and FB can
test at scale, yes, other people can test large clusters too -but nobody
has a network that looks like yours but you. And Hadoop does care about
network configurations. Testing beta and release candidate releases in
your infrastructure, helps verify that the final release will work on
your site, and you don't end up getting all the phone calls about
something not working
