Red Hat is similar, but offers CentOS as a 100% binary compatible distribution. Not offering openly a binary build can lead to fewer customers and adoption in the end.   Enterprise who want to have support will pay for a support subscription anyway. The others you don't need.... ... View more

I could introduce HDP in the company because getting new stacks/software in a public company requires frame agreements. The "open source" aspect resulted in choosing Hortonworks (vs Cloudera) at that time. Comparision: for products such as RHEL you have alternatives (CentOS)   Like this our team could get experience with HDP for more then one year long after that we had all the possibilities to buy both HDP and HDF : once the paperwork was finished. Also it is easier for evaluation.   In my opinion a model such as Elasticsearch or Confluent for Kafka uses is better. Just protect important components for running the stack at 'enterprise' scale, with security, support... (things cloud vendors would 'misuse') by using subscriptions.   "Hiding" the base binary distribution is just utterly stupid (adoption etc) Also very important is the quality of the documentation. There is a difference....     ... View more