Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Pentaho and DataStax
We announced a strategic partnership with DataStax today: http://www.pentaho.com/press-room/releases/datastax-and-pentaho-jointly-deliver-complete-analytics-solution-for-apache-cassandra/
DataStax provides products and services for the popular Apache No-SQL database Cassandra. We are releasing our first round of Cassandra integration in our next major release and you can download it today (see below).
Our Cassandra integration includes open source data integration steps to read from, and write to Cassandra. So you can integrate Cassandra into your data architecture using Pentaho Data Integration/Kettle and avoid creating a Big Silo – all with a nice drag/drop graphical UI. Since our tools are integrated, you can create desktop and web-based reports directly on top of Cassandra. You can also use our tools to extract and aggregate data into a datamart for interactive exploration and analysis. We are demoing these capabilities at the Strata conference in Santa Clara this week.
Links
- Product downloads, how-to videos and documents are available at http://www.pentaho.com/cassandra and http://www.datastax.com/pentaho
- Attend the webinar on March 15th to learn more and about using Cassandra’s integration with Pentaho Kettle http://www.pentaho.com/datastax-webinar
- Download, access how-to documents and videos at http://community.pentaho.com/BigData
Exporting, Reporting, and Visualizing: Get more from your data in MongoDB
I’m presenting this session tomorrow at the MongoDB LA conference. We’ve got some great tech to demo.
Tweet tag – #mongodbLA
Pentaho BI 4.0 Thin Client APIs and Theming webinar tomorrow
Tomorrow I’m doing a session about the new data access APIs in the V4.0 release, as well sharing some knowledge about the new theme system in the BI server.
Here is the session info for those that are interested:
Topic: Pentaho Community Technical WebEx – James Dixon – Pentaho BI 4.0 Thin Client APIs and Theming
Date and Time:
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 10:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 2:00 pm, Greenwich Time (Reykjavik, GMT)
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 4:00 pm, Europe Summer Time (Paris, GMT+02:00)
Thursday, September 1, 2011 12:00 am, Australia Eastern Standard Time (Sydney, GMT+10:00)
Event number: 712 776 191
Event password: opensource
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To join the online event
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1. Click here to join the online event.
Or copy and paste the following link to a browser:
2. Click “Join Now”.
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To join the teleconference only
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Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 1-866-699-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-408-792-6300
Global call-in numbers: https://pentaho.webex.com/pentaho/globalcallin.php?serviceType=EC&ED=161656302&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
Access code: 712 776 191
Using open source software is not a sin. We encourage it.
Brian Gentile of Jaspersoft usually has some interesting and worthwhile things to say on his blog. But, in his latest post, he seems to have gone stark raving mad (to put it politely).
The sin in open source comes from contributing neither one’s time nor money
He makes the bold statement that using open source software without contributing to that project is a sin. I’m not misquoting him, he says its a sin.
He goes on to say that if you use JasperSoft community edition you are required to contribute.
Your contribution is required.
This is called quid-pro-quo – they does something for you and you must do something for them. In some parts of the planet, certain forms of quid-pro-quo are classified as harassment and are illegal. This attitude towards community also rates very low on the openness scale – Gentile is only open to community members who are going to contribute directly, and within a time-frame that Jaspersoft finds agreeable. I’m not sure the OSI will approve that license.
Obviously I disagree with his statements. Completely. Utterly. On multiple fronts.
Self-Interest
Firstly, open source works best when all participants act purely out of self-interest, and by doing so, the other participants benefit as a side effect. Here are some examples:
- Reduce Future Work: I have contributed bug fixes to Apache foundation and JBoss projects. I did this not because I feel an obligation to do so, but because I want them to maintain the patch in future versions so I don’t have to continually merge my change with each new version. I contribute my bug fixes purely out of self-interest – I want to reduce my future workload. I also didn’t go looking for those bugs. I came across those bugs while trying to use their open source software to solve a real problem or requirement I faced. By contributing my fixes out of self-interested all the other participants gain higher quality software.
- Education and Career: In prior decades it was not easy to show potential employers your prior work – because often all of it was the proprietary intellectual property of your previous employers. Today, if you are a software engineer, technical writer, graphic artist etc, you can contribute to open source projects as a way of demonstrating your work. This is particularly true of certain open source projects – if you have contributed code to the Linux kernel your lifetime earning potential is probably higher as a result. If you are a software engineer and you want to work at RedHat, your application for a position will considered significantly more if you are active in their community.
- Getting It Done: Community members don’t post questions on forums for fun. They do it because they have a problem of some kind, and it is stopping them from getting something done. Maybe their question get answered, maybe it doesn’t. Either way the question is a contribution – often a question it identifies a problem with the installer, or the documentation, or a feature, or the download site, or the expectations set by the web site etc. The asker of the question did not ask it in order to gently identify an opportunity for improvement, they did it out of self-interest, but it still counts as a contribution.
- Status and Satisfaction: It is satisfying to contribute in a community. There is also status and reputation to be gained. While this form of reward is not monetary, career-driven, or externally noticeable, is a benefit that is derived by the participant. If the community member did not feel this satisfaction, they would not waste their time contributing. If there is a particular application area you are interested in (music, graphics, gaming, mobile devices etc), but there are no career opportunities open to you, you can participate in an open source project to satisfy your interest/curiosity.
- Business: Some companies sponsor projects by encouraging (sometimes requiring) their employees to contribute to open source projects. In some cases these companies do this because they are services companies that want to demonstrate expertise with certain technologies to help attract new customers. The company gains attention and reputation, and in doing so the open source project and community benefit from the time and resources (selfishly) donated. Other companies sponsor their employees to contribute because the company relies on the software operationally. To reduce their risk of failures and downtime, the company needs to have engineers on staff who have deep technical knowledge of the software.
- Changing Market Dynamics: The act of choosing to use open source software instead of a proprietary alternative changes the market dynamics in favor of commercial open source companies. Just using the software is a contribution. Sometimes those users tell other people about the software they are using, and encourage them to use it. The community grows, and the market changes more. Over time this dynamic and the continual community growth help all the participants.
As you can see there are many varied reasons people contribute to open source. In all these cases the participants are acting out of self-interest, but the community as a whole benefits from these selfish actions. But guilt and obligation are not on this list – they are very weak motivations.
With a commercial open source software (COSS) project you have a company that is the single most important participating organization. The motivations of this company are very important. It does not matter which company you look at, whether it’s RedHat, MySQL (Oracle), Pentaho, or Jaspersoft, that company exists for self-interest – to make money. There is nothing wrong with this, it’s actually very healthy. If the stewarding company is acting out of self-interest, you should not expect the community to act differently.
Monetizing the Community
Secondly Gentile is making an elementary mistake, one that is common among those that are new to the COSS business model. Gentile states ”Open source communities thrive based on the community members donating either their time and/or money”. Within the COSS world getting community members to buy software and services is called ‘Monetizing the Community’. It is a clumsy term that encourages misguided actions. I refer to my Beekeeper model. In there I state:
Customers are corporations, the community are people. They have very different needs.
The Beekeeper model makes it clear that it is pointless for a COSS company to try to sell it’s enterprise software and services to community members. This statement is true for all COSS companies that focus on business software (it is not true for open source consumer software such as games). This distinction is important, and it is missing from Gentile’s desperate plea. I’m guessing that only a very small percentage of the Jaspersoft installations are for personal use. Reporting software just isn’t that much fun. The majority of Jaspersoft’s installations are for business purposes. The individual who installed the software is usually a technical end user or an IT developer. Either way, the individual is not going to buy the software for their own needs – if a purchase of software is made, the customer will be the employer, not the community member. As a COSS company you can provide tools for your community members to persuade their employers to become customers, and you can explain how this benefits both companies involved and the community. For most COSS companies is it impossible to monetize the community directly, and therefore ridiculous to try. Trying to berate community members into purchasing business software shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the commercial open source business model. Asking, begging, or requiring community members to purchase your software is futile, Gentile.
I’m not pretending that the COSS business model is easy. I’m not pretending that Pentaho does not have room for improvement either. I am stating that Pentaho provides more BI functionality in open source than Jaspersoft, and that you are welcome to use that software – sin-free and guilt-free.
SalesForce needs a good CRM system
Today I received some sales spam from SalesForce.com. Nothing unusual about that except that we are a customer of SalesForce.com.
It’s not a good demonstration of their product capabilities if the king of SaaS Customer Relationship Management can’t internally identify who their customer are. #Fail
SalesForce needs a better CRM system. Any suggestions?
Deploying a web server on a smart card
Apparently you can run a Java HTTP servlet engine on a smart card: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javacard/javacard-servlets/
Certainly its an interesting capability. I just can’t think of anything useful I could do with it.
Web Posting Response Assessment
Not sure whether, or how, to respond to an article, blog, or comment you see online? Let this decision tree help you.
This web-based decision tree is adapted from the ‘U.S. Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment’ that was created by the Air Force Public Affairs Agency and put into the Public Domain. Click here to view the original (the chart is the last page of the PDF).
Click Here To Start
Evaluate: Relevance
You have discovered an article, blog, comment about your organization, hobby, domain or interest. What is the date on the post, is the post still relevant?
YES NO
Click here to go to the start of the decision tree
Evaluate: Concurrence
You can provide a factual and well-cited response, which may agree or disagree with the post, yet is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature. You can concur with the item, let it stand, or provide a positive review.
Do you wish to respond?
