But what's the rush?

First of all, Kobielus explains, just as open-source products ranging from Mozilla to Android have earned widespread acceptance in the IT community after some birth pains, open-source data storage and analysis software have now matured ("no longer the risky bet they were just a year or two ago," as he puts it).

Secondly, Kobielus wrote, platforms like Hadoop, R and NoSQL have enjoyed an advantage over proprietary software because they were able to evolve faster. They're also being continuously developed and refined by many different parties. Pretty soon, he predicts, open-source will begin to dominate the big data world.

"As the footprint of closed-source software shrinks in many data/analytics environments, many incumbent vendors will evolve their business models toward open-source approaches," he wrote, "and also ramp up professional services and systems integration to assist customers in their moves towards open-source, cloud-oriented analytics, much of it focused on Hadoop and R.

"Forrester regards Hadoop, for example, as the nucleus of the next-generation enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in the cloud, and R as a key codebase in the coming wave of integrated big data development tools. We also expect various open-source NoSQL databases and tools to coalesce into rich alternatives to closed-source content analytics offerings."