Interesting business model around a F/OSS project:
https://databricks.com/try-databricks
https://databricks.com/product/pricing
So, they give you a 6GiB of RAM "micro-cluster" (presumably in AWS) for free, along with a notebook environment for playing with Spark's API, learning resources, and a way to share your work. But if you go from DCE to "production", you pay $99/month as a license fee for up to 3 Spark users, plus $288/month for every AWS node you run full-time in your Spark cluster.
Presumably, Spark is able to treat the "free" 6 GiB micro clusters of the community edition as a customer acquisition cost (VC-funded loss leader) for eventual pro users, who, if they work at companies with huge data processing needs, might work out to thousands of dollars per month of recurring revenue.
