EMC spin-off Pivotal Software Inc. has upset the Hadoop world’s applecart by announcing a plan to open-source the majority of its Big Data and analytics software.

The company is releasing its products as open-source software under the Pivotal Big Data Suite banner, and will allow anyone to download and use them for free, modify them as they see fit, and contribute code for future editions. It’s plan also calls for a strengthening of its partnership with Hortonworks Inc., one of the big three Hadoop distribution vendors. Pivotal offers its own Hadoop distro, but has been cuddling up to Hortonworks since last July.

The move is a big deal for Hortonworks, as the company will basically be providing support for customers using Pivotal HD. Even more importantly, Pivotal will stop recommending its Hadoop platform in favor of Hortonworks’, in all but a few case. In addition, the two companies will team up to support and develop the analytics engine HAWQ, and also GemFire, a solution that enables software deployment in large-scale environments.

Pivotal isn’t making all of its Big Data products free. The commercial versions of its software will still come with additional capabilities and features not seen in the free edition, and it will continue to provide support for customers who buy them.

Sundeep Madra, VP and GM of the data product group at Pivotal, told TechCrunch the company’s move was inspired by its success with Cloud Foundry, which is also offered as open-source and commerical versions.

“We have had a lot of success with Cloud Foundry and we’ve been able to monetize it,” explained Madra, who felt Pivotal could achieve similar success with its Big Data suite.

In order to boost its chances, Pivotal simultaneously announced the launch of a new industry group called the Open Data Platform (ODP) that’s devoted to promoting Hadoop and its related software. As well as Pivotal and Hortonworks, Platinum members of the group include GE, IBM, Infosys and SAS, while AltiScale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Splunk, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Teradata, and VMware have all signed on as Gold members.

Madra told The Register the ODP’s central aim was to make it easier for organizations to adopt Hadoop, just as Linux did for Unix. The group will set about creating “a tested reference core of Apache Hadoop, Apache Ambari and related Apache source artifacts” in order to help users get started with Hadoop.

The ODP claims to be open to new members, but neither MapR Technologies nor Intel-backed Cloudera are planning to jump on the bandwagon anytime soon.

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