Another major open source company has launched a set of training programs, and in this case, they’re all free. Today, big data vendor MapR announced web-based Hadoop training courses, as well as a certification program.

All of the courses will be available online and remain completely free, MapR said. Starting today, three courses are available—Hadoop Essentials, Hadoop Operations: Cluster Administration and Developing Hadoop Applications—and four more will arrive later this quarter, according to the company.

MapR, which developed the course materials and training program in-house, said the offering constitutes “a $50M in-kind contribution to the broad Hadoop community,” since the training will provide a free avenue for acquiring expertise in Hadoop and related Big Data technologies.

Notably, MapR said the training will focus, for the most part, on general Hadoop topics, not those specific to MapR’s distribution. “We do have some information in there that’s specific to MapR, but when that’s in there, it’s called out,” MapR CMO Jack Norris said in an interview.

Norris added that the company’s decision to offering generic Hadoop training reflects MapR’s belief that, in contrast to most open source vendors, which make money by adding services on top of freely available open source products, MapR offers value-added components for the product itself, in this case Hadoop. “MapR is unique because we’ve integrated at the platform level,” Norris said.

The company’s intent in offering the free training is to help “people to understand and use Hadoop” as a basic platform, Norris said. The expectation is that, in turn, MapR will attract new customers to its big data products by allowing more professionals to understand their value.

In addition to providing the free training, MapR has partnered with testing company Innovative Exams to offer Hadoop certifications in the developer, data analyst and administrator categories, as well as an HBase developer certification.