Open Source Solutions

Welcome to the conclusion of the conversation held on March 1st with James Dixon, Chief Geek, and Lance Walter, VP of Marketing for Pentaho, Clarise Z. Doval Santos, and Joseph di Paolantonio. In this third podcast, we talked mainly about community, and how Pentaho supports its community. Community is one of the most important aspects of an open source project. And communication is the most important means of building that community. Pentaho uses their forums, analysis of the conversations going on, and email to bring the community discussion directly into the heart of Pentaho development.

James points out that, by the very nature of business intelligence, the Pentaho community comes from other businesses. Because Pentaho has built a stack through cooperation with other BI open source projects, there is also a great deal of interaction among the members of communities from all of these projects, such as JasperSoft and Mondrian. But one incredible strength that the community brings to Pentaho is in the area of QA. Not just in bug identification and fixes to assure that the code conforms to specifications, but in contributing real-life use cases so that the specifications conform to real business needs and satisfies the users. Pentaho can release a version or module and begin getting feedback by the next day.

Another interesting difference between open source and proprietary software, is that a project can finish in open source. There doesn't exist the need to continually push our new, and possibly unneeded features, that exists in proprietary software, as the revenue stream for open source isn't dependent on forced upgrade license fees. In open source, when the community has determined that the project meets the needs, there are no more contributions. The project may not be releasing new code, but is far from dead. It has reached the required state of usefullness, and meets the users' needs.

Lance appreciates both the feedback, as well as the ability to turn-around the product rapidly, with freedom from the giant 18-month release cycles. Lance also discusses the training that Pentaho is making available through WebEx and other training plans. Sign up at:

https://pentaho.webex.com/pentaho

Pentaho Overview, Part 3

This podcast is about 26 minutes long.

Don't miss the other two parts of this conversation: Part 1 and Part 2.

We would like to thank DOVAL for permission to use excerpts from his hit single "Love Lost" for our opening and closing tracks.