It's just very very odd. I don't see clear evidence of a corporation backing this project (certainly the website doesn't make clear mention of one), and yet the release is being pitched as though the project is being run by a business. They even claim to have a "Vice President of Apache Drill", whatever that means.
Is there a company backing Drill that I'm not aware of? Or is it genuinely a community project? I mean, it cites "Forest Hill, MD" which implies a headquarters of some kind... but it's not at all clear.
This matters. It matters for users and companies that use the product, and for developers contributing. Is there some company with tight control over the development path (with all the potential attendant risks)? Are there options for third party support?
Or is this just another community project that's being dressed up as something else?
Apache has a number of vice-presidents. The reason is that making a release establishes that the Apache Software Foundation is standing behind the release and the licensing. The policy is that this requires the imprimatur of a corporate officer, thus each project has a VP who can sign off on releases.
There are a number of companies with employees who are involved in Drill. These include MapR, Hortonworks and Twitter. That doesn't imply corporate sponsorship of Drill since all contributors in Apache contribute as individuals.
Agreed. If they are re-investing money to grow the product, that might be why they aren't currently profitable. That doesn't indicate a lack of success in my book.
Interested in hearing more about this. Taking care of this would help with the adoption (and priority) of this project. If you have any tips, please feel free to drop a line at jherrick at gmail. Thanks!
I love my http://untappd.com and the integration with FourSquare makes me think there's a lot of potential using their API (or location data in general) to add location-awareness to an "social" application. I'm sure it's difficult to monetize that, but it's a ton of value.
Good list. I would also suggested eliminating outlying items based on prices. It seems like when there are dozens of items named XXX, there will be several with "hard drive for XXX" or something.
I must believe there's any easy way to eliminate some "outliers" using mathematics, but I can't recall the function(s) to do so.
At the moment I'm filtering out items 2 standard deviations out of the median. It catches the ridiculous cases, i.e. when some fool tries to get away with selling an iphone for $6000 (yes I've seen this before).
Perhaps I need to filter it within 1 or 1.5 stdevs. Will experiment with this.
However, sometimes you can easily see there are two clusters of results. Not sure how to mathematically determine this. Any ideas?
