The HPCC Systems platform is being offered under a dual-license open source model with two editions: the open source Community Edition and the Commercial Enterprise Edition.

The Community Edition will come with source code, available through a versioning control system and periodic snapshots. Binary versions of the Community Edition will also be made available at important milestones. Support for the Community Edition will be provided by the community.

The Enterprise Edition is provided as an enterprise-ready set of binary installable packages, together with documentation, support, indemnity and additional modules normally required in highly available critical or production type environments. There are fees (i.e., License Fees) associated to the Enterprise Edition and its support.

The Community Edition is free to download, includes the source code, and as of v3.10 is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. New code from HPCC Systems and Community contributors will land here first, so expect to see it continuously changing and growing. By the nature of the open source development process and the fact that the source code repository will be in constant evolution, it is recommended that binary versions be used for anything beyond experimentation and/or platform code development. If you are a developer, or you are just interested in seeing how things work under the hood, this is the version for you.

The Enterprise Edition is available under a paid commercial license. The Enterprise Edition includes support, indemnification and additional modules that are usually required for critical and production environments. If you represent an organization intending to use the HPCC platform to support a critical or production type business/application, this is the version that you should use.

Of course! The ECL language does not differ between Community and Enterprise Editions. Applications written under either edition will run unmodified on the other platform; the only exception being ECL code requiring ECL libraries or plugins only available under the Enterprise Edition or which are part of our Add-on modules.

Individuals and organizations willing to contribute code will need to sign a contributor agreement. Once the contributory agreement is signed, their contributions can be processed for acceptance in the codebase, after undergoing a review to ensure it meets quality and functionality requirements. In special cases, certain frequent contributors can gain committer status and be allowed to directly commit their code to the public source code repository.

Yes, but it should be understood that unlike Hadoop, writing a program in ECL does NOT involve extending the base classes. Within the HPCC the implementation of ECL is entirely abstract from the USAGE of ECL. Anything you do that USES ECL is not bound by license; anything that CHANGES ECL is bound by license. This is to ensure that ‘ECL’ is well defined and that libraries written in ECL can be shared from one installation to another.