Cloud 9 is an easy to use Hadoop MapReduce library by Jimmy Lin from the University of Maryland using the Apache 2.0 license ( http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/cloud9/docs/). The library contains a very convenient, lightweight JSON serializable class. One can use this class instead of rolling your own custom serializable objects and it could help me for the GSOC .
What are Mahout's/ASF's policies regarding the use of such open third party libraries? What is the general opinion regarding using JSON serialization on Hadoop? In another email conversation, Grant did mention that JSON is slow and also that GSON had been used in the past by Mahout. Also, I had allocated sufficient time in my proposal, almost one month for implementing this custom object during the mapper's implementation so I could still just go ahead as planned before.
