Talend, the open source data integration house, said Monday that it has acquired the rights to Amalto Technologies’ Master Data Management (MDM) widgetry, which will make it the first company to put out a commercial open source MDM product.

It figures the stuff is as good as any proprietary MDM solution and they run from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Talend says it means to “democratize MDM for the masses” by offering a free open source MDM solution governed by the GPL as well as a commercial subscription with value-added features and services.

The Amalto technology preserves what might be called a “golden record” of data that would otherwise be siloed in bits and pieces – incomplete, inconsistent and often inaccurate – across various company applications by linking all the data to one shareable “master file.”

It’s described as flexible, with fast time-to-value and will play to Talend’s core data integration and data quality software so it can cover the data lifecycle.

Talend, which currently claims 600 paying customers including Yahoo, Virgin Mobile and Sony, will be integrating them.

It wouldn’t say what it paid other than that it was cash. Amalto will focus on B2B exchanges from here on out.