Proprietary Software may be a Trap

Jennifer Scott | ComputerWeekly | June 27, 2013

Open source is winning praise in enterprises thanks to businesses realising the risk of letting proprietary software control their businesses.

This is the belief of Doug Cutting, creator of big data platform Hadoop and CEO of Cloudera, which uses the solution as the basis of its own big data solution.

Speaking at his company’s offices in San Francisco, he said: “I think people learned that proprietary software was a trap for their business and having the base platform that holds your most valuable data controlled by someone else is very dangerous.”

“You can end up paying unknown amounts in the future and that is a threat that people didn’t want to experience again.”

Cutting believed enterprises now trust the open source model, when previously there had been fear of the unknown. However, he admitted adoption was slower in Europe than in the US.