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Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

blog.mortardata.com

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Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#11

Post by showerst »

gmisra wrote: post #7
showerst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial - A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge). Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use…

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from.

It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me.

I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS code is that you can self-host, and/or modify it for business use if you so choose.

To me this would be better served by advertising "We like you so much, we're giving away access to our service for free for noncommercial and test use, and opening up the code to the library so you can see how it works", but that's less interesting as click bait.

Maybe i'm just mis-reading the whole thing and you can self-host.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#12

Post by catern »

ethanbond wrote: post #6
showerst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial - A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge). Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use…

It reads like "open source but not free to make proprietary." First, it's awesome just to see source as something to learn from. Second, it seems reasonable they don't want people forking, modifying then profiting from their work without contributing back to it - either by also releasing source or by paying. I think it's a nice model actually.

It's called the GPL. If that's really the model they're trying to create, it would be nice if they just used the GPL.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#13

Post by alexhawdon »

contingencies wrote: post #10

So hang on, what exactly is a recommendation engine? They give examples of LinkedIn ( people you may know ) and Amazon (presumably other people who bought this , so-and-so's list of such-a-subject books ). That makes sense, though the segment of businesses that may actually benefit seems limited. Social stuff, sure. Most of us? What's the minimum recommendable-entity/category-or-user threshold that this makes sense f…

https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys will provide you with a good introduction to the topic

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#14

Post by contingencies »

alexhawdon wrote: post #13
contingencies wrote: post #10

So hang on, what exactly is a recommendation engine? They give examples of LinkedIn ( people you may know ) and Amazon (presumably other people who bought this , so-and-so's list of such-a-subject books ). That makes sense, though the segment of businesses that may actually benefit seems limited. Social stuff, sure. Most of us? What's the minimum recommendable-entity/category-or-user threshold that this makes sense f…

https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys will provide you with a good introduction to the topic

Thanks. For others who are interested, that course apparently uses a different piece of software called LensKit http://lenskit.grouplens.org/

Could anyone summarize the difference between Pig and LensKit when applied to recommendation systems?

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#15

Post by alecsmart1 »

olidb2 wrote: post #9

FWIW we've been using the mortar platform to run large pig jobs without a fuss at http://datadog.com and we've been very happy with it. Glad to see them contribute their recommender code too.

Can you please suggest why you need a recommendation engine for datadog?

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#17

Post by gmisra »

showerst wrote: post #11
gmisra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from. It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me. I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS…

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."

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#18

Post by [deleted] »

catern wrote: post #12
ethanbond wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reads like "open source but not free to make proprietary." First, it's awesome just to see source as something to learn from. Second, it seems reasonable they don't want people forking, modifying then profiting from their work without contributing back to it - either by also releasing source or by paying. I think it's a nice model actually.

It's called the GPL. If that's really the model they're trying to create, it would be nice if they just used the GPL.

[deleted]

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#19

Post by olidb2 »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #15
olidb2 wrote: post #9

FWIW we've been using the mortar platform to run large pig jobs without a fuss at http://datadog.com and we've been very happy with it. Glad to see them contribute their recommender code too.

Can you please suggest why you need a recommendation engine for datadog?

We don't use the recommendation engine but the underlying platform, which makes it really simple to write and run pig jobs. Though the majority of our business deals with real-time data processing, the ability to crunch numbers in batch without dev or ops overhead is attractive and well worth the price to us.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#20

Post by simonster »

showerst wrote: post #11
gmisra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from. It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me. I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS…

It seems to me that you can self-host. There is reasonable installation documentation at http://mortar-framework.org/. You just have to set up the infrastructure yourself, which you would have had to do anyway if they didn't offer hosting. It also seems that you can use their platform for only the cost of AWS if you don't mind open-sourcing your recommendation engine, which sounds terrific if your project is itself open source. Honestly, I can't find any qualms with this. Their business model seems to be that you will probably pay them $100/year (or $500/year for team access) because it's easier/cheaper than DIY.
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