Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. Hadoop is a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors, using the Java programming language. Yahoo! has been the largest contributor to the project, and uses Hadoop extensively across its businesses. Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, who named it after his son's toy elephant. It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project.