Druid, an open source database designed for real-time analysis, is moving to the Apache 2 software license in order to hopefully spur more use of and innovation around the project. It was open sourced in late 2012 under the GPL license, which is generally considered more restrictive than the Apache license in terms of how software can be reused.
Druid was created by advertising analytics startup Metamarkets (see disclosure) and is used by numerous large web companies, including eBay, Netflix, PayPal, Time Warner Cable and Yahoo. Because of the nature Metamarkets’ business, Druid requires data to include a timestamp and is probably best described as a time-series database. It’s designed to ingest terabytes of data per hour and is often used for things such as analyzing user or network activity over time.
Mike Driscoll, Metamarkets’ co-founder and CEO, is confident now is the time for open source tools to really catch on — even more so than they already have in the form of Hadoop and various NoSQL data stores — because of the ubiquity of software as a service and the emergence of new resource managers such as Apache Mesos. In the former case, open source technologies underpin multiuser applications that require a high degree of scale and flexibility on the infrastructure level, while in the latter case databases like Druid are just delivered as a service internally from a company’s pool of resources.
However it happens, Driscoll said, “I don’t think proprietary databases have long for this world.”
Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in Gigaom.
