Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and open source

“How did you get to Open Source?

Cutting: After close to 15 years in the software business, I had
a piece of software that I’d written on my own time, figuring that
I would commercialize it. That was Lucene. I wasn’t very interested
in building a business. Negotiating license fees and paperwork
around that was stuff that I didn’t enjoy. What I really wanted was
for people to use the software, which was a theme I found through
my career.

I had been involved with Excite in the 90s. I’d gotten to the
point where I spent many years writing software there and the
software was gone from the Earth for all practical purposes. The
company went bankrupt and all the software was swallowed into some
intellectual property black hole.

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