On Twitter today, Lance Walter asked me to go into the Ark Business with him, and Gareth Greenaway asked for entertainment. It must be a rainy Friday afternoon

I'm not sure about Lance's offer, but I did tell Gareth the following story, from tweet-start to tweet-end. This isn't word for word as I tweeted. 'Tis a bit expanded, but the tale is the same.

Once upon a time there was a young penguin named Tux. Tux decided to set off on a journey through IT Land. Now IT Land is a dangerous place, full of hackers fighting crackers, and ruled by those in the Ivory Tower and the acolytes of the Megaliths.

Along the way, the adventurous Tux met the Dolphin, the Elephant and the Beekeeper. They made a pact on the Lucid glyph to become a Dynamo of IT, bringing power to the datasmiths of the Land.

They met many Titans from the Megaliths on their Quest. The Beekeeper used the open source bees to open the scrum along the way, blocking the hookers with their sharp claws.

Some of the Titans were helpful, some, not so much.

The Dolphin was empowered by the Sun. But the Sun was consumed by a powerful Oracle. The Elephant, too, gained a powerful ally, and they do Enterprise against the Oracle. The band of the Quest was broken, and Tux was sad.

The Era of Lucid thought ended, but the Dynamo yet powers the Lucid Glyph, and Tux can rely on the Dynamo and the Beekeeper to predict a future clear of the Oracle.

And thus this quest ends, but another soon begins, where Tux will meet new friends and new foes. Will Beastie and the dæmons be allies? Will the Paladin in the Red Hat be stalwart?

Perhaps we'll find out at OSCON, for Gareth suggested that an assemblage of geeks would enjoy this story, and we'll see if OSCON thinks our tales worthy of a keynote slot in 2010.

Do you recognize all the characters in this tale? Maybe the links will help.

What say you, OSCON? Would these tales make a worthy Keynote?

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

As promised in my post, "Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers First Look", I've taken the time to thoroughly grok Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers by Will Gorman [direct link to Packt Publishing][Buy the book from Amazon]. I've read the book, cover-to-cover, and gone through the [non-Java] exercises. As I said in my first look at this book, it contains nuggets of wisdom and practicalities drawn from deep insider knowledge. This book does best serve its target audience, Java developers with a need to incorporate reporting into their applications. But it is also useful for report developers who wish to know more about Pentaho, and Pentaho users who wish to make their use of Pentaho easier and the resulting reporting experience richer.

The first three chapters provide a very good introduction to Pentaho Reporting and its relationship to the Pentaho BI Suite and the company Pentaho, historical, technical and practical. These three chapters are also the ones that have clearly marked sections for Java specific information and exercises. By the end of Chapter Three, you'll have installed Pentaho Report Designer, and built several rich reports. If you're a Java developer, you'll have had the opportunity to incorporate these reports into both Tomcat J2EE or Swing web applications. You'll have been introduced to the rich reporting capabilities of Pentaho, accessing data sources, the underlying Java libraries, and the various output options that include PDF, Excel, CSV, RTF, XML and plain text.

Chapters 4 through 8 is all about the WYSIWYG Pentaho Report Designer, the pixel-level control that it gives you over the layout of your reports, and the many wonderful capabilities provided by Pentaho Reporting from a wide range of chart types to embedding numeric and text functions, to cross-tabs and sub-reports. Other than Chapter 5, these chapters are as useful for a business user creating their own reports, as it is for a report developer. Chapter 5 is a very deep dive, very technical look at incorporating various data sources. The two areas that really stand out are the charts (Chapter 6) and functions (Chapter 7).

There are a baker's dozen types of charts covered, with an example for each type. Some of the more exotic are Waterfall, Bar-Line, Radar and Extended XY Series charts.

There are hundreds of parameters, functions and expressions that can be used in Pentaho Reports, and Will covers them all. The formula capability of Pentaho Reporting follows the OpenFormula standard, similar to the support for formulæ in Microsoft Excel, and the same as that followed by OpenOffice.org. One can provide computed text or numeric values within Pentaho reports to a fairly complex extent. Chapter 7 provides a great introduction to using this feature.

Chapters 9 through 11 are very much for the software developer, covering the development of Interactive Reports in Swing and HTML, the use of Pentaho's APIs and extension of Pentaho Reporting capabilities. It's all interesting stuff, that really explains the technology of Pentaho Reporting, but there's little here that is of use to the business user or non-Java report developer.

The first part of Chapter 12, on the other hand, is of little use to the Java developer, as it shows how to take reports created in Pentaho Report Designer and publish them through the Pentaho BI-Server, including formats suitable to mobile devices, such as the iPhone. The latter part of Chapter 12 goes into the use of metadata, and is useful both for the report developer and the Java developer.

So, as I said in my first look, the majority of the book is useful even if you're not a Java developer who needs to incorporate sophisticated reports into your application. That being said, Will Gorman does an excellent job in explaining Pentaho Reporting, and making it very useful for business users, report designers, report developers and, his target audience, Java developers. I heartily recommend that you buy this book. [Amazon link]

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I was approached by Richard Dias of Packt Publishing to review "Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers" written by Will Gorman. (Link is to Amazon.com)

LinkedIn
Richard Dias has indicated you are a Friend:

Hi Joseph,

My name is Richard Dias and I work for Packt Publishing which specializes in publishing focused IT related books.

I was wondering if you would be interesteed in reviewing the book "Pentaho Reporting for Java Developers" written by Will Gorman.

- Richard Dias

After some back and forth, I decided to accept the book in exchange for my review.

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the reply and interest in reviewing the book. I have just placed an order for a copy of the book and it should arrive at your place within 10 days. Please do let me know when you receive it.

I have also created a unique link for you. It is http://www.packtpub.com/pentaho-reporting-3-5-for-java-developers?utm_source=press.teleinteractive.net&utm_medium=bookrev&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=mdb_001537. Please feel free to use this link in your book review.

In the meanwhile, if you could mention about the book on your blog and tweet about the book, it would be highly appreciated. Please do let me know if it is fine with you.

I’m also sending you the link of an extracted chapter from the book (Chapter 6 Including Charts and Graphics in Reports). It would be great if you could put up the link on your blog. This would act as first hand information for your readers and they will also be able to download the file.

Any queries or suggestions are always welcome.

I look forward to your reply.

Best Regards,

Richard

Richard Dias
Marketing Research Executive | Packt Publishing | www.PacktPub.com

Shortly thereafter, I received notification that the book had shipped. It arrived within two weeks.

Of course, I've been too busy to do more than skim through the book. Anyone who follows me as JAdP on Twitter knows that in the past few weeks, I've been:

• helping customers with algorithm development and implementing Pentaho on LucidDB,
• working with Nicholas Goodman with his planning for commercial support of LucidDB through Dynamo Business Intelligence, and roadmaps for DynamoDB packages built on LucidDB's plugin architecture, and
• migrating our RHEL host at ServerBeach from our old machine to a new one, while dealing with issues brought about by ServerBeach migrating to Peer1's tools.

None of which has left any time for a thorough review of "Pentaho Reporting for Java Developers".

I hope to have a full review up shortly after the holidays, which for me runs from Solstice to Epiphany, and maybe into the following weekend.

First, a little background. Will Gorman, the author, works for Pentaho, in software engineering, as a team lead, and works primarily on Pentaho Reporting products, a combination of server-side (Pentaho BI-Server), Desktop (MacOSX, Linux and Windows platforms) and Web-based software (Reporting Engine, Report Designer, Report Design Wizard and Pentaho Ad Hoc Reporting), which stems from the open source JFreeReport and JFreeChart. While I don't know Will personally, I do know quite a few individuals at Pentaho, and in the Pentaho community. I very much endorse their philosophy towards open source, and the way they've treated the open source projects and communities that they've integrated into their Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite. I do follow Will on Twitter, and on the IRC Freednode Channel, ##pentaho.

I myself am not a Java Developer, so at first I was not attracted to a book with a title that seemed geared to Pentaho Developers. Having skimmed through the book, I think that the title was poorly chosen. (Sorry Richard). I find that I can read through the book without stumbling, and that there is plenty of good intelligence that will help me better server and instruct my customers through the use of Pentaho Report Designer.

My initial impressions are good. The content seems full of golden nuggets of "how-tos" and background information not commonly known among the Pentaho community. Will's knowledge of Pentaho Reporting and how it fits into the rest of the Pentaho tools, such as KETTLE (Pentaho Data Integration) and Mondrian (Pentaho Analysis), along with a clear writing style makes all aspects of Pentaho more accessible to the BI practitioner, as well as those that wish to embed Pentaho Reporting into their own application.

This book is not just for Java developers, but for anyone who wishes to extend their abilities in BI, Reporting and Analysis, with Pentaho as an excellent example.

I'll be following up with the really exciting finds as I wend my way through Will's gold mine of knowledge, and, will do my best to fulfill my promise of a full review by mid-January.

You can also click through the Chapter 6 (a PDF) as mentioned in Richard's email.

Thank you, Richard. And most especially, thank you, Will.

This post is in response to "Volunteer for the Greater Good" written by S. Kleiman. I remember that village in Pennsylvania, and the attitudes of my friend at that time. I'm not surprised that you're attracted to open source; I am surprised that you're having trouble with embracing its ideals. We've have had an email exchange on this subject, and, as you know, I'm fairly attracted to open source solutions my self. I hadn't seen your blog prior to answering your email, so let me go into a bit more detail here.

"The model contributor is a real geek – a guy in his 20-30’s, single, lives in his parent’s basement, no mortgage, no responsibility other than to pick up his dirty socks (some even have mothers who will do that)." -- "Volunteer for the Greater Good" by S. Kleiman

Wow. What a stereotype, and one that couldn't be further from the truth. Admittedly, during economic downturns, when software developers are forced to take whatever job they can find to put food on the table, many contribute to open source projects, ones that don't have commercial support and ones that do. This helps that open source project and its community. But, it also helps the developers to keep their skills sharp and maintain credibility. Most open source developers get paid. Some are students. Some are entrepreneurs. But most get paid, it's their job. And even if it's not their job, projects have learned to give back to communities.

While there are hundreds of thousands of open source projects on Sourceforge.net and other forges, many have never gone beyond the proposal stage, and have nothing to download. The number of active open source projects does number in the tens of thousands, and that is still pretty amazing. The idea that the great unwashed contribute to these projects whilst Mom does laundry... Well, that just doesn't wash. The vast majority of open source communities are started by 1 - 5 developers, who have a common goal that can be obtained through that specific open source project. They have strict governance in place to assure that the source code in the main project tree can be submitted only by those that have founded the project, or those that have gained a place of respect and trust in the community (a meritocracy) through the value of the code that they have contributed for plugins, through forums, and the like.

Most active open source projects fall into two categories, and many have slipped back and forth between these two.

1. A labour of love, creating something that no one else has created for the sheer joy of it, or to solve a specific pain point for the lead developer
2. A commercial endeavor, backed by an organization or organizations to solve their own enterprise needs or those of a specific market

While there are thousands of examples of both types, let me give just a few examples of some developers that I know personally, or companies with which I'm familiar.

Mondrian was founded by Julian Hyde, primarily as a labour of love. I know Julian, and he's an incredibly bright fellow. [And public congratulations to you, Julian and to your wife, on the recent birth of Sebastian]. In addition to be the father of Sebastian and Mondrian, Julian is also the Chief Architect of SQLstream, and a contributor to the Eigenbase project. Not exactly sitting around in the basement, coding away and waiting for Mom to clean up after him. You can read Julian's blog on Open Source OLAP and Stuff, and follow Julian's Twitter stream too. By the way, while Mondrian can still be found on Sourceforge.net under its original license, it is also sponsored by Pentaho, and can be found as Pentaho Analysis, and as the analytical heart of the Pentaho BI Suite, JasperSoft BI Suite and SpagoBI.

Two other fellows had somewhat similar problems to solve and felt that the commercial solutions designed to move data around were simply too bloated, too complex, and prone to failure to boot. I don't believe that these two knew each other, and their problems were different enough to take different forms in the open source solutions that they created. I'm talking about Matt Casters, founder of the KETTLE ETL tool for data warehousing, and Ross Mason, founder of the Mule ESB. Both of them had an itch to scratch, and felt that the best way to scratch it was to create their own software, and leverage the power of the open source communities to refine their back scratchers. KETTLE, too, can now be found in Pentaho, as Pentaho Data Integration. Ross co-founded both Ricston and MuleSource to monetize his brain child, and has done an excellent job with the annual MuleCons. Matt still lives in Belgium, and has been known to share the fine beers produced by a local monastery [Thanks Matt]. You should follow Matt's blog too. Ross lives on the Island of Malta, and Ross blogs about Mule and the Maltese lifestyle.

Let's look at two other projects: Talend and WSO2. Both of these are newer entrants into the ETL and SOA space respectively, and both were started as commercial efforts by companies of the same name. I haven't had the opportunity to sit down with the Talend folk. I have spoken with the founders of WSO2, and they have an incredible passion that simply couldn't be fulfilled with their prior employer. So they founded their company, and their open source product, and haven't looked back. You can follow Sanjiva's Blog to learn more about WSO2 and their approach to open source.

And just one more, and somewhat different example: projects started by multiple educational institutions to meet their unique needs: Kuali for ERP and Sakai for learning management. For another take on commercialization, The rSmart Group contributes to these projects, but is commercializing them as appliances sold to educational institutions. You can read more about this rather different approach to monetizing open source at Chris Coppola's blog.

There are many, many more such examples. Just in the area of data management & analysis, we cover over 60 related open source projects [take a look at the blogroll in the sidebar to the right.

..."they organize themselves into groups of developers and maintainers on an adhoc basis, and on a world-wide basis. And the end products are robust, well developed, and well tested." -- "Volunteer for the Greater Good" by S. Kleiman

I think we've covered my rebuttal to your posting between the first quote and this one. I very much agree with this statement. I'm surprised by your surprise. The organizational dynamics that result in the excellent code that comprise open source projects is the subject of much thought, admiration and research. Here's a few places that you can go for more information.

• The Beekeeper by James Dixon, CTO and Chief Geek of Pentaho
• Susan Gasson of Drexel University
• Agile & 8D and article on Open Scrum by Clarise Z. Doval Santos & Joseph A. di Paolantonio - look for the link to the mindmap

And just for completeness sake, here's our email exchange:

From S. Kleiman: "OS is the current bug in my head. I'm trying to understand why my intellectual property should be "open" to the world (according to Richard Stallman.

Yes, I've read the copious amounts of literature on open software and the economics thereof - but I still don't get it. If I apply for a patent on a gadget, and then license companies to make that gadget - isn't that intellectual property? To copy my design, while it doesn't destroy my design, does limit any profit I might gain.

Anyway - how are you? Are you one of the original hackers?
I realized that all this time I though I had a great practical engineering degree. Instead I realize they made us into hackers - in the best sense of the word.

What is your experience with OS? What are you talking about (besides the title)?
How is the "snow" in CA? "

And my response:

Discussions around open source often get very passionate, so we should be having this conversation on a warm beach cooled by ocean breezes, fueled with lots of espresso ristretto followed by rounds of grappa to lower inhibitions and destroy preconceptions ;-)

But email is all we have.

Most open source projects are software, though there are a few examples of hardware projects such as Bug Labs, TrollTech (bought by Nokia, I think), OpenMojo and one for UAVs.

I should start by pointing out that I'm not presenting at the Open Source Business Conference, but am moderating a panel.

http://www.infoworld.com/event/osbc/09/osbc_agenda.html

Session Title: Moving Open Source Up the Stack

Session Abstract: Open Source Solutions for IT infrastructure have shown great success in organizations of all types
and sizes. OSS for business applications have seen greater difficulties in penetrating the glass ceiling
of the enterprise stack. We have put together a panel representing the EU and the US, system
integrators, vendors and buyers, and corporate focus vs. education focus. We''ll explore how the OSS
application strategy has changed over the past four years. We will also look at success and failures,
the trade-offs and the opportunities in solving business/end-user needs with OSS enterprise
applications.

Learning Objective 1: Most buyers know the 80% capability for 20% cost mantra of most OSS vendors, but we''ll focus on
what that lower cost actually buys.

Learning Objective 2: Where does OSS fit in the higher levels of the application stack? Learn how flexibility & mashups
can improve the end user experience.

Learning Objective 3: Learn how to come out ahead on the trade-offs of up-front cost vs. operational cost, experience and
learning curves, maintenance and replacement, stagnation and growth.

Here are the confirmed panelists:

(1) Tim Golden, Vice President - Unix Engineering, Security & Provisioning, Bank of America
(2) Gabriele Ruffatti, Architectures & Consulting Director, Research & Innovation Division, Engineering Group, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.
(3) Aaron Fulkerson, CEO/Founder, mindtouch
(4) Lance Walter, Vice President - Marketing, Pentaho
(5) Christopher D. Coppola, President, The rSmart Group
(Moderator) Joseph A. di Paolantonio, Principal Consultant/Blogger/Analyst, InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc.

So, back to the "Why open source" discussion.

You might want to listen to a couple of our podcasts:

http://press.teleinteractive.net/tialife/2005/06/30/what_is_open_source

http://press.teleinteractive.net/tialife/2005/07/01/why_open_source

or not :-D

Historically, there were analog computers programmer by moving around jumper cables and circuits. Then there were general purpose computers programmed in machine language. Companies like IBM got the idea of adding operating systems, compilers and even full applications to their new mainframes to make them more useful and "user friendly" with languages like COBOL for the average business person and FORTRAN fir those crazy engineers. Later Sun, Apple, HP and others designed RISC based CPU's with tightly integrated operating systems for great performance. Throughout all this, academicians and data processing folk would send each other paper or magnetic tapes and enhance the general body of knowledge concerning running and programming computers. There eventually grew close to 100 flavours of Unix, either the freely available BSD version or the more tightly licensed AT&T version.

Then a little company called Microsoft changed the game, showing that hardware was a commodity and the money was in patenting, copywriting and using restrictive licenses to make the money in computers come from software sales.

Fast forward ~15 years and the principals in Netscape decided to take a page from the Free Software Foundation & their GNU (Gnu is not Unix) General Public License and the more permissive Berkeley License for BSD and as a final recourse in their lost battle to the Microsoft monopoly, coined the term "open source" and released the geiko web rendering engine under the Mozilla Public License. And the philosophical wars were on.

When I was the General Manager of CapTech IT Services, I had a couple of SunOS Sys Admins who spent their spare time writing code to improve FreeBSD & NetBSD. I let them use their beach time to further contribute to these projects. Then a young'un came along who wanted to do the same for this upstart variant of minix called Linux. :-D. All of this piqued my interest in F/LOSS.

Today, I feel that F/LOSS is a development method and not a distribution method nor a business model. If you look at IBM, HP, Oracle and others, you'll find that >50% of their money comes from services. Just as M$ commodified hardware and caused the Intel CISC architecture to win over proprietary RISC chips, software has become a commodity. Services is how one makes money in the computer market. With an open source development methodology, a company can create and leverage a community, not just for core development but for plugins and extensions, but more importantly that community can be leveraged ad thousands of QA testers at all levels: modules, regression & UAT, for thousands of use cases, and for forum level customer support (People, people helping people, are the happiest people on the world ;-)

Can the functions in your application be replicated by someone else without duplicating a single line of your code? Are the margins on your software sales being forced below 10%? Does most of your profit come from support, system integration, customizations or SaaS? Then why not leverage your community?

So, this is a really short answer to a really complex issue.

To answer some of your other questions...

I'm not an hacker nor a programmer of any type. I have started to
play around with the open source R statistical language to recreate my Objective Bayes assessment technique and grow beyond the (Fortran on OS/360 of VAX/VMS) applications that I caused to be created from it.

I haven't gotten to the snow in a couple of years, but we're in a drought cycle. Though it is storming as I write this.

I hope this helps you with your open source struggle, my friend. And thank you for putting up with me being a wordy bastard for the past /cough /harumph years. Oh, and note the Creative Commons license for this post. This must really cause you great consternation as a writer. Oh, and I'm not going to touch your post on Stallman.

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Today, SQLStream announced version 2.0 of their Real Time BI solution. SQLStream comes from the fertile creativity of Julian Hyde, who is also the founder of the open source Mondrian OLAP engine. While SQLStream is not open source, it does stem from the open source Eigenbase community, leveraging the user-defined transforms that were originally developed for LucidDB to operate on traditional stored relational data, with SQL:2003-compliant syntax. SQLStream extends this to handle streaming relational data.

In addition to capturing standard, structured data while "on the wire", SQLStream also includes adapters for feeds, such as Atom and RSS, and for Twitter.

Methinks Julian and I need to schedule another lunch soon, so that I can learn more about how this unstructured data, especially from Twitter, can fit into real time analytics provided by SQLStream v2.0.

BTW, you can follow me on Twitter as @JAdP.

Except where otherwise noted, this content is
licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I've been "hearing" all day on Twitter that Microsoft would be announcing something big at OSCON2008. Perhaps this is it:

Microsoft today announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro, provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost effective for customers of all sizes to manage and glean insight from the ever expanding amount of data generated by and for businesses, employees and consumers.
-- Press Release "Microsoft to Acquire DATAllegro"

This is very interesting given the progress that Microsoft has made with its analytic services binding MS Office and SQL Server. Further quoting from the press release:

“Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing and the addition of the DATAllegro team and their technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing.”
-- Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft

The direction for DATAllegro's data warehouse appliance is also made clear in the press release:

“DATAllegro's integration with SQL Server is the opti mal next generation solution and the acquisition by Microsoft is a great conclusion for the company.”
-- Lisa Lambert, Intel Capital managing director, Software and Solutions Group.

For those who don't know, DATAllegro is a data warehousing appliance company that utilizes "EMC® storage, Dell™ servers, Cisco® InfiniBand switches, Intel® multi-core CPUs and the Ingres® open source database".

So, whither Ingres in this acquisition? As we've written before here, Ingres is one of the earliest and strongest RDBMS products, which was absorbed by CA and then spun off again with an open source play in 2005. MS SQL Server, of course, started out as a rebranding of Sybase SQL*Server, until the partnership dissolved in the mid-1990's. Since then, MS SQL Server has been geared mostly as a workgroup and data mart server. It seems that a switch from Ingres to MS SQL Server could heavily undermine DATAllegro's business. In addition, the switchover in code to T-SQL will be a nightmare for developers. Add to that the challenges of moving from Linux to MS Windows, and from C/C++ to C# and it will take quite some time in production environments to iron out all the wrinkles.

In addition, while most seem to think that this puts Microsoft in a good position to challenge Oracle for the Enterprise Data Warehouse lead, it actually puts Microsoft directly into competition with other DW appliance vendors, such as Teradata. I truly doubt that this move will position Microsoft strongly into competition with either Oracle or Teradata, but merely marks another tactical error in Microsoft's increasingly desperate acquisition strategy to move deeper into the Enterprise on one hand, while striving to move further into the online space on the other.

More can be read at:

• VentureBeat "Microsoft Acquires DATAllegro"
• Information Week: "Microsoft to Buy DATAllegro"
• Mark Madsen in Intelligent Enterprise "What the Microsoft-DatAllegro Deal Means for Customers, Vendors and BI"

With the opening of the Apple iPhone AppStore on iTunes and with the iPhone2.0 software, I decided to take a look for iPhone BI apps.

The first, from Pentaho, is open source. "Pentaho's BI extension for iPhone works with Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.7. Download and configuration instructions, as well as a short, recorded video demonstration are available..." from Pentaho's iPhone page. Matt Casters has more on his blog, "pentaho and the iphone".

The second is not open source, but is free from iTunes, but "Requires the licensing of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus, and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition..." Wow.

Even though I have the latest iTunes7.7, it's showing that my iPhone1.1.4 is up to date. We'll have to start playing with these as soon as iPhone2.0 is generally available - later today maybe.

I recently joined Twitter. I must share the following:

Roebot: #e20 note to organizers: If your panelists do NOT know what SOAP and REST are they prolly shouldn't be on a mashup panel!!! WTF!! about 5 hours ago from twhirl
-- Aaron Roe Fulkerson on Twitter

To which I responded:

Joseph_di_P: @Roebot wiki(SOAP) is what you use in tub to get clean; wiki(REST) is what you do in tub when not using SOAP :-D Easy, yah! about 1 hour ago from Hahlo in reply to Roebot
-- my response on Twitter

I know, I know, all the important stuff happening in the Open Source BI related world this week, and this is what I blog about. Is it a sign of dementia when you crack yourself up?

Here's some of the more important stuff that's been happening:

• Executive movement at EnterpriseDB, as told by Andy Astor
• The Pentaho BI Platform goes GPLv2, and Nick Goodman talks about it
• SnapLogic v2 released with webinars, one was today and the next is on June 18
• The new JasperSoft CEO blogs a bit
• The Pentaho community meetup in Mainz, Germany is about to start
• MuleSource is demoing the new Mule components working together
• Your iPhone will no longer need to be jailbroken, after iPhone 2 firmware, to work with myFunambol and even better than Apple's mobileMe, myFunambol is on track to sync Notes, per the press release

There's much else to do, including some additions to our linkblog with open source for MDM and more open source communities. But, I'm tweeting.

The highlight of JavaOne for me has become supper with Gianugo Rabellino, the founder and CEO of SourceSense. For now, each year…

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.'"
-- from the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" within Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

… For our conversations are wide ranging and thoroughly engaging as we indulge our enjoyment of fine food and open source.

This year, Gianugo has been in the USA several times, for the Open Source Think Tank and the Open Source Business Conference, and on business. An employee of SourceSense even had a gig in the town in which I was raised. Unfortunately discovering it to be the arm pit of the United States. Ah well, it's why I live in the SF Bay Area now.

We talked of tempering chocolate, unusual eating habits of various cultures, the worsening economy, European vs USA political views, and Gianugo even had me read, while sober, the Pronunciation Poem. [I flubbed a few words, and disagree with some of the rhymes given that my dialect is as Philly as a Chesse Steak.]

But we also talked about Open Source; all the open source related conferences and blogging and work and newsworthy activities of the past few months. Here are some of my thoughts.

Open Source is a Philosophy

This one has been bubbling around in my head for years. Open Source, in and of itself is NOT

• a licensing template
• a business model
• a development methodology

It is a philosophy that can provide the framework for those three things with which it is most often identified. The variations among what the open source philosophy means to each of its followers can best be seen from the proliferation of licenses, business models and methodologies all claiming to be open source.

To me, the open source philosophy is very simple, and it can be applied to solutions for some very complex problems and concerns: the source is available to anyone who obtains the end-product, whether one has obtained the end-product through a no-cost download or through a purchase agreement of whatever type. The "source" may be the "source code" for software, but, to me, it should be whatever specifications and design documentation are required to recreate the end-product in either the original or a modified form.

There are a variety of reasons that a developer, an engineer, an inventor, a creator, might what to subscribe to an open source philosophy. And each individual or business must decide if those reasons make creative and economic sense for them. Once one has decided to subscribe to open source, or any philosophy, then all your other decisions will only lead to success if they are logically consistent within that philosophy. The licensing language, business model, economic forecasting, internal processes and external relationships should form a coherent whole within the underlying philosophical framework.

Business Models Will be Different for Different Markets

Organizations often look for the silver bullet or the golden mantra or the platinum ring that will solve their problems, lead to dominance in the marketplace, or allow them to rule them all. So we hear a lot of talk about the "best" open source business model. This search ignores that fact that there are open source solutions for many markets. Without going into specific verticals, let's just consider four general, horizontal markets that are addressed by open source software.

1. Information Technology Infrastructure: including operating systems such as the various flavours of linux and BSD unix, application servers, and other middleware such as the Mule ESB, WSO2 SOA solutions & KETTLE for ETL, web servers, email MTA, the Funambol Mobile Server platform, and many more.
2. End User Applications on the Desktop/Laptop/Mobile-Device: with OpenOffice.org and its MacOSX offshoot NeoOffice, Projivity OpenProj, and Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird likely being the most well known, but also including many thousands of open source projects for artistic creation and enjoyment, as well as office and personal productivity, and gaming, and all things that one personally does on a computer
3. Software Development Tools: from the Eclipse IDE to hundreds and thousands of specific language libraries and everything else a developer might need; this is even more "by geeks for geeks" than the infrastructure area
4. Enterprise Applications: these are end-user facing applications, often fulfilling mission critical needs, such as ERP, CRM and BI, and is the least mature market for open source providers and the hardest area to gain acceptance

No one business model, no matter how generically expressed, could satisfy these four disparate markets. Monetizing these areas will come from combining innovative and traditional packaging of support, customizations, system integration, training, licensing, and subscriptions.

Automated maintenance, repair and update networks might work very well for monetizing IT infrastructure, but might be insufficient for the other markets. Ad based monetization, directly or through partnerships with ad networks like Google's, might work for some end-user applications. Putting out the begging bowl, asking for PayPal contributions might also work. But for many open source projects, there simply isn't any path to monetization.

One area that I think has been insufficiently explored, and might well be the only path to success for the Enterprise Application open source vendors is Software as a Service. The SaaS approach, whether through partner channels or directly, is the most sensible means of monetizing a wide variety of open source applications. Embrace the open source philosophy, leverage the strengths of flexibility and community in the licensing, business models and processes, and monetize through SaaS delivery into vertical and niche markets.

And for the rest, just acknowledging that your company is a software company embracing an open source philosophy, and building appropriate support and licensing structures will be the best path.

Communities are Strongest when Open

Developing a community around a product is not unique to the open source world. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS, SPSS, IBM, etc, etc, etc have all developed and supported great communities made up of ISVs, VARs and Users. The difference however, is that open source projects are very dependent on their community. Conversely, communities are strongest when there are no artificial limits to communication.

I think that most companies are embracing at least this one ramification of the open source philosophy. Though it seems to me that when the source isn't open, the community can only converse and support each other in surface issues.

One area though, where open source vendors still seem to be uncertain, is the definition of community, and what groups make up their community, and if they must develop different communities for different categories of members: developers, users, non-software contributors, paying customers, or partners. I think this is self-defeating. There is only one community for each project: those who want to be involved and will benefit from that involvement, ultimately to the betterment of the project, whether directly or indirectly, whether monetary or not, whether contributing code or documentation or use cases or testing or playing around with the project or complaining about it or just soaking up the ambience. Can any open source project community manager give a valid reason why any of these should be excluded from the community or ignored?

Open Source Sales are Very Foreign to Most IT Buyers

Whether we're talking about senior IT management, the CIO, or the purchasing department, the idea of freely downloading the fully operational, unlimited version of a product, and using it for research, prototyping or production, without handholding, cosseting or sales incentives is complete anathema to those making purchasing decisions.

Did you ever see a "vendor bake-off" among products from Oracle, IBM and SAP without vendor involvement, without vendor sales engineers fine-tuning and providing weeks of free labour? Is there any open source company that provides a corporate jet and box seats at the super bowl? And is there anyone who has ever been part of selling (internally or as a vendor) a large, big-budget enterprise project to a CIO or purchasing committee, who doesn't believe that such freebies and perks are essential elements to the approval process?

Many, too many, open source vendor CEOs believe that bloatware (more features than most users will use), vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability, and high prices of initial licenses are the problems CIOs worry and that open source software solves. They think success will come from "80% of the capabilities for 20% of the cost" of their closed source competitors. I don't believe any of it. CIOs worry about being beat up by the business side and greasing the squeaky wheel. The two highest costs in a data center are people and energy, not licenses or maintenance agreements. Implementation costs: hardware, software licenses, personnel and training, are spread out over three to five years with appropriate tax implications. For really large projects such as a full ERP or data warehouse, there is at least a ten year life expectancy. Why do you think that there are so many mainframes and COBOL applications still around? The implementation costs were written-off long ago, and the on-going support costs are minimal because they still JUST WORK. Those with an eye to economics are more concerned about the total cost of ownership over the complete 10-year lifecycle of a capital project, than with the 10% or less of those costs that go towards initial software licenses.

So, if the only way for open source vendors to become big players, or as one CIO put it, to "move out of the junior varsity", is to look like the big players, to provide pre-sales engineering and collateral beyond a T-shirt, then what will this do the business model and the belief in "20% of the cost"? It will destroy it. This is why there are more openings for sales & marketing than for engineers at open source companies today.

Open Source Vendors will grow and evolve and come to operate more and more like the big players they're destined to become. As long as they continue to adhere to their form of the open source philosophy, are internally consistent and true to the logic of their open source framework, they'll continue to benefit from the true value of open source: flexibility and community knowledge to a greater degree than can be achieved by any closed-source vendor or any isolated, enterprise data center with home-grown solutions. Speaking of which…

Open Source is the Middling Ground between Build vs Buy

This is another point I've been hammering for years. Traditionally, IT shops were either build or buy. The build shops were very development oriented and created custom solutions to implement business processes and support business users. The buy shops bought COTS software, and either convinced the business that the software they bought implemented industry best practices, or spent millions of dollars in customization.

Build shops suffer from isolation and the total burden of maintaining and updating the software they built. When the only developer left who remembers and understands the code, retires, faith often becomes the best practice for ongoing support.

Buy shops suffer from ongoing dependancy on the vendor(s) and ongoing compromises for the users.

Build shops should be (but often aren't) more flexible to respond to changing business needs, and can be more valuable to the business.

Buy shops can be more reliable and cost-effective - really. But not always.

One result of Y2K [remember that?] was that most IT departments became much more of a blend of build and buy, with buy decisions winning out. Coupling this with the facilitation of distributed workgroups made possible by the Internet expanding world wide, and offsourcing [outsourcing operations to offshore companies] decimated many corporate data centers by solving the personnel and energy cost problems. Guess what? Implementation and licensing and maintenance costs remain the same. Some CIOs use offsourcing as the reason that they don't use open source; the outsourced vendor isn't familiar with it, and has no incentive to use it.

As companies bring IT back inside, and as its importance to the business is once again realized, open source offers a third path to the traditional build or buy. However, offsourcing will still be a substantial part of the solution, and should lead OSVs to recognize the importance of offsourcing vendors and embrace them as partners and very important channels.

The IT shop that responds to the business using open source can be both flexible and well-supported. The open source vendors that make such IT shops succeed through flexibility and reliability will be the most successful ones. This can be achieved through the OSVs growing their support, professional services and training organizations, or by partnering with all sizes of PS, VAR and outsourcing firms, or both.

Conclusions

The real conclusion is that bringing the open source philosophy to fruition in business is still an evolving process. The advantages gained by the openness of the source and the strength of the community is being recognized by both the IT shops and the OSVs. While there are cost savings to be had, OSVs need to stop relying on initial licensing cost reductions as their main selling point, and begin to market the advantages to the IT shop of using open source: responsiveness to changing business needs and increasing reliability over time, all while providing the best TCO and ROI.

There's a lot more to be said on all of these topics and opinions, and maybe I'll even get the time do so.

InfoWorld has made downloads available for selected presentations from this year's Open Source Business Conference. The links will take you to PDF files. But, Matt, where are your video mashups?