@Ted I don't see Cloudera buying Sean out of Mahout. As, I recall it, Sean stepped down as PMC Chair after a discussion on the future of mahout, where he saw his future vision for the project not concur with that of the others. He reduced his engagement with mahout and built myrrix first on his own. In my eyes, Oryx looks like myrrix + classification and clustering.
@Sean However, I also cannot understand why Cloudera and you need to start a new open source project that in many ways mirrors what mahout offers. Why not contribute the algorithm implementations (the computation layer) to mahout and built the serving layer as a project on top of that? I don't see what would have prevented this, I would think it would have been warmly welcomed by this community. It is not that this new project creates competition from which users will benefit, its exactly the opposite. To me it feels like an intentional abandonment of mahout. Instead of giving users a single project where we could have united efforts, users now have to choose between two things that in general do the same things with each of them missing some functionality. In my eyes, users lose here. I can also understand Ted's worries about Cloudera's attitude towards open source, after having heard Impala's view of "open source" at the last Buzzwords (the lead developer of Impala answered the question whether Impala accepts patches with the statement that Impala is developed by Cloudera engineers and others can only look at the source code on github...). I hope that Oryx chooses another path (I also hope this for Impala). Its a very bad day for mahout today. --sebastian PS: I still have to comment to this statement: "I don't think the current state of the code means it's feasible to truly evolve it towards things like Hadoop 2, Spark, real-time." To me this sounds like a marketing statement, "look, we can give you something better than mahout". Porting mahout's algorithms to spark is something that can be done with very little effort, I ported RowSimilarityJob in a single evening recently as a getting started with Spark exercise. Making the codebase ready is only a matter of will to invest time and efforts. On 12.11.2013 16:54, Sean Owen wrote: > On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: >> Cloudera's primary influence is to get you to ask to go emeritus, i.e. stop >> contributing. >> >> You have contributed in the past. That's great. And now you work for >> Cloudera. > > I started building on a new code base and left the PMC from about mid > 2012 and began at Cloudera in July 2013. Right -- check the archives? > I mean... it doesn't add up even time-wise. > > It's only relevant in that I hope to expose and defuse this suggestion > of some kind of plot. Certainly, it's best to steer clear of what > might be perceived as vendor stone-throwing... I am sure it's not > relevant to dev@. > > >> Getting a paycheck is also a legitimate reason for you do this. And it >> should be recognized where the paycheck comes from and what is really going >> on. > > A plot so deep even the plotters are unaware! I am definitely paid to > write open source code as are a lot of people here and it's a Good > Thing. Surely we do not suggest otherwise? > > >> Well, I think that it is a hypocrisy fail going on. I get criticized all >> the time by Cloudera employees for "not being open". And now the shoe is >> on the other foot where Cloudera decides it is better to not contribute to >> an existing open source project and, indeed, even hires away a key >> developer of same. > > I don't understand the equivalence -- was it not clear that Oryx is > open source not proprietary? -- but pursuing it is just going to look > like vendor spat. > > I don't understand the idea that contributing to one open source > project is wrong, but to another is right. Mahout is not more sacred > than any other, nor more open or important by having an Apache badge. > It can't be that, because Mahout exists, nobody else should try to > write anything like ML on Hadoop. > > Ted sorry to be on your black list -- a lesson to anyone else thinking > of leaving an Apache project? ay, you know where I live! I am happy to > be accused of working on another open project now, but hope nobody > agrees with the other suggestions. I'd feel bad if it were read widely > this way. >
