Yahoo is dropping its own Hadoop distribution, deciding to instead focus on Apache Hadoop, It was an arduous decision for team members at Yahoo, especially since the project was one very near to many employees’ hearts.  The news came in conjunction with the O’Reilly Strata Conference, held in California this week to discuss many pressing issues around cloud computing.

Hadoop, which was initially built by Apache Chairman Doug Cutting while still at Yahoo, has grown to prominence in data centers and cloud computing as an industry.  With this decision comes the long process of “undoing” the many man-hours of work that went into Hadoop’s implementation, with a long vision steady on the future.

Yahoo plans to remove all references to a Yahoo distribution from its website, closing its github repo, and resting its focus on working closely with the Apache community.  The intent here is to aid Apache in the production of binary releases for its Hadoop product, working towards a solid release that can be easily integrated in Hadoop clusters.

It’s a challenge for any company to undertake such a feat, and in Yahoo’s ongoing changes company-wide, it’s an important journey that must re-shift attention back to Yahoo’s core.  When it comes to open-source cloud projects, however, the very word implementation carries an entirely different meaning.  That process of re-branding its own involvement with Hadoop highlights the obstacles that the cloud industry still bears, making Yahoo a willing witness in overcoming new iterations of a spcialized project.

What remains clear, however, is Yahoo’s commitment to open sourcing within the cloud developer community, having revised its goals as they relate to Hadoop.  “We’ve concluded that focusing on Apache Hadoop is the way forward,” says Eric Baldeschwieler, vice president of Hadoop development at Yahoo. We believe that more focus on communicating our goals to the Apache Hadoop community, and more willingness to compromise on how we get to those goals, will help us get back to making Hadoop even better.”