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.
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."
