Hadoop creator leaves Yahoo

Doug Cutting, creator of the Hadoop open source framework, has left Yahoo and moved to Cloudera, a recently founded start-up which specialises in Cutting's creation. In an interview with the New York Times, Cutting said he was looking forward to working on more diverse problems for the distributed computing framework rather than tuning Hadoop for Yahoo's internal use.

Hadoop is an open source implementation of Google's Map/Reduce technology, which takes large data sets and breaks them up into smaller, more digestible, chunks which can be processed by a large number of relatively cheap computers. Yahoo use Hadoop as part of their search infrastructure, which is destined to become redundant in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search partnership which sees Microsoft's Bing become Yahoo's search provider. Cutting says his departure from Yahoo has been planned for some time and was not triggered by the Microsoft/Yahoo deal.

Hadoop development is under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation as an Apache project and licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Cloudera aims to sell consulting and support services to allow companies to deploy the technology more easily, and are looking at industries beyond search, such as banks, biotech or oil and gas companies.

(djwm)