What, Exactly, Is “Proprietary Hadoop”? Proposed: “distribution-specific.”

Many things have changed in the software industry in an era when the use of open source software has pervaded the mainstream IT shop. One of them is the significance – and descriptive adequacy – of the word “proprietary.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker.” In the Hadoop marketplace, it has come to be used – even by me, I must admit – to mean “not Apache, even though it’s open source.”

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