[gmisra]

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."

[sandGorgon]

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

[NyxWulf]

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.

[jhorey]

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).