Doug Cutting is leaving his job working on Hadoop at Yahoo! to work on Hadoop at Cloudera, a Silicon Valley Startup. Cutting founded Hadoop, an open source framework designed to break up large sets of data in order to make them more easily manipulated. Yahoo! obviously uses Hadoop, but other companies such as Facebook uses it as well.

Many are perceiving the exit as a reaction to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, but Cutting told the New York Times that is not so. He said he wants to move from simply tuning Hadoop for Yahoo! to tweaking it for more diverse applications. That certainly sounds plausible, but it won’t fully quell the suspicion.