Google, for one, has been doing this kind of thing for years. Dremel (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html), for instance, was the subject of a paper they published after they'd been developing and using it internally for years. It's never been open sourced, but there's now Apache Drill (http://incubator.apache.org/drill/) which is based on the same paper. In short, it's part marketing, part recruiting, and part ego. I'm hopeful that Twitter will at least publish a research paper that digs into some of the nuances of Manhattan and compares/contrasts against other technologies.

There is also Parquet from Twitter which is inspired by the Dremel paper: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/dremel-made-simple-with-parque...