NSA Concedes Hadoop Beats Its Pricey Alternatives

Despite its billion-dollar budget, the open-source community builds better Big Data technology than the NSA.

The U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting terrorists. Ironically, however, the best technology available to fight terror likely isn't a line item on the National Security Agency's (NSA) $8 to $10 billion budget. More probably it's Hadoop, which is open source and 100% free.

This is a big deal, because it suggests that technology has finally become democratized. When an interested 10-year old programmer has access to the same heavy-duty Big Data technology as the budget-rich NSA, we have arrived. And we have open source to thank for it.