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Aren't most open source projects single source in practice? even the big non-profit projects tend to have a single company heavily promoting and developing them

• Macha 6y ago
  Databricks most popular open source contributions are with Spark, which is owned by Apache, not by Databricks. Looking at Delta Lake, a more recent project still owned by them, it uses a DCO, not a CLA, which means it only has the clauses that relate to a developer stating they have a legal right to license the software as open source (apache 2.0 in this case). Likewise Cloudera mostly works on Apache owned projects. This is important, because it means that while Apache could relicense to give themselves an unfair advantage, Cloudera or Databricks could not. People trust Apache not to, being an independent non-profit and the act would destroy their reputation, and given the ASF's main product is being seen as vendor neutral and independent (well that or Apache httpd, but the latter is clearly becoming less and less relevant), would be a serious blow to the organisation.
  • lumost 6y ago
    The point of my post is that in practice these companies donated their effort to an apache project rather than building their own as it provided trust that licenses would not become too unfavorable in the future and adoption cheaper adoption path to traditional data centers. In practice if Cloudera decided to they could fork hadoop to create "cloudoop" or otherwise stop submitting patches upstream and hadoop development would considerably slow. Given the nature of software, slow development is often equivalent to reverse development as dependencies fall out of date and the project becomes abandoned.