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Comment by pixelmade | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?

"We’re giving over a year’s worth of work on our recommendation engine away because we want to earn your business on our platform."

From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial -

A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge).

Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use this for business you'll still need to pay. Unless i'm misreading it, "Open source but you'll still have to go through our platform" is pretty disingenuous.

It reads like "open source but not free to make proprietary." First, it's awesome just to see source as something to learn from. Second, it seems reasonable they don't want people forking, modifying then profiting from their work without contributing back to it - either by also releasing source or by paying.

I think it's a nice model actually.

It's called the GPL. If that's really the model they're trying to create, it would be nice if they just used the GPL.

It's opensourced under Apache 2.0 license. That means, it's free as in freedom, with all the legal ability to be forked and profited from. AFAIK, the only substantial difference between Apache 2.0 and GPLv3 is that APL2 is not copyleft license. That means, one's fork is not even required to remain opensourced (as far as it contains a reference to original APL-licensed version).

So either Mortar opensourced some feature-crippled fragment of their platform, and it relies on features from their proprietary platform heavily; or the statement of requirement Mortar account is property of the Tutorial's approach, not the opensourced code itself.

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

The code is all released under Apache, but is all the code needed to use this thing released? If the parent poster is accurate that a user still needs to engage with their platform, this conversation is just pedantics and sophistry over what "open" means.

You can run the code on your local machine, on Amazon ElasticMapReduce, or on your own Hadoop cluster. This really is a give-away of useful open source code.

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from.

It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me.

I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS code is that you can self-host, and/or modify it for business use if you so choose.

To me this would be better served by advertising "We like you so much, we're giving away access to our service for free for noncommercial and test use, and opening up the code to the library so you can see how it works", but that's less interesting as click bait.

Maybe i'm just mis-reading the whole thing and you can self-host.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm in agreement with your opinions regarding false promises of open source, and also that this is increasingly a problem. However, I don't think that actually applies here. Specifics:

1. Everything in this github repository (https://github.com/mortardata/mortar-recsys) appears to be truly open - it's just a bunch of pig scripts, some java UDF definitions, and some python management code. There doesn't appear to be any dependencies on proprietary MortarData anything. All the code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

2. The blog post states: " You can run this code anywhere. It’s built on widely-adopted open source technologies—Hadoop, Pig, and Python. But we think you’ll want to use our platform."

I cant find the part which provisions the mapreduce cluster - isnt that part of their platform lockin ?

You can use Amazon Elastic MapReduce to provision your own cluster. I'm guessing the value prop they bring is the ease of handling that part for you.

If you want a relatively simple way to provision a Hadoop cluster locally, you may want to try out Ferry (http://ferry.opencore.io). It's based off Docker, so in theory, you could also write a nice Dockerfile to deploy Mortar's recommendation engine. (full disclosure, I'm the author of Ferry).

It seems to me that you can self-host. There is reasonable installation documentation at http://mortar-framework.org/. You just have to set up the infrastructure yourself, which you would have had to do anyway if they didn't offer hosting. It also seems that you can use their platform for only the cost of AWS if you don't mind open-sourcing your recommendation engine, which sounds terrific if your project is itself open source. Honestly, I can't find any qualms with this. Their business model seems to be that you will probably pay them $100/year (or $500/year for team access) because it's easier/cheaper than DIY.

To my mind it depends a little on what functionality is behind the account. If this is a huge chunk of functionality, that presently depends on their infrastructure but doesn't have to, then I think that's fine (though certainly enough to self-host would be better). If this is basically a thin wrapper and all the actual functionality is in their proprietary server code, then it's hugely disingenuous.

The code does not depend on the infrastructure. You can execute the Pig code locally on your machine, or on your own hadoop cluster. This really is a 'free' give-away of code.

Fantastic! Thanks.

You can easily run the Pig code they released yourself.

I can't help but feel that this is akin to complaining that someone gave you the cart, but not the horse. You can buy or build your own horse, or rent someone else's. It doesn't stop the cart from being freely given.

s/build/breed/

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