Of Pentaho and Jaspersoft, David Stodder (Ventana Research: http://searchdatamanagement.te...29,00.html) said: “The vendors make money by charging for support and maintenance, and by selling premium versions of their BI software.” He also said “Though free offerings from JasperSoft, Actuate and Pentaho can handle basic reporting and data analytics, for more sophisticated features, like complex graphical reports and drillable charts, customers often need to upgrade to -- and pay for -- professional editions.” It seems to me that he is saying the give-away free version only does the ‘basics’, but you need to buy their software. My experience is this: We tried to download their free versions and run them, and we found that the free versions are undocumented and therefore nightmares to install and get working. Esentially, if you want to see these products running in your company, you pretty well must pay the money for the supported version, or you’re not really serious about getting it working, or you are a software expert and your time has no value. I have formed the opinion, for all those tens of thousands of downloads of the free version, they are probably students who are using it as part of a school project or deploying it in ma and pa businesses. Nothing wrong with that, just not interesting to me, and, if I am right about that, then what’s the value of the statistic?

BTW, I don't agree with everything that was said in that article. For example, it was suggested that the business community benefits from the Open Source community process because there were 30 releases in one year. On this point, I think that's folly. That would be organizational chaos, and how can there be good quality control for that kind of thing. This kind of NEGATIVE TRAIT of Open Source is exactly why companies like Pentaho, Jaspersoft and now nextanalytics have separate and distinct versions.

MySQL has taken it a step further. You can download executables, use it for free and, the install does actually work and the product is immediately useful. If you want to use it for your organization, you will probably need to upgrade to the “for fee” versions. I think the big furor recently was probably more to do that MySQL really was built by the community, so the founders weren’t supposed to change the game rules.

I suspect this is not so much like the situation of Pentaho and Jaspersoft. I suppose that those products were built more by founders rather than a community. That’s why those two smaller companies operate by a different flavour of Open Source than MySQL. I like their model and it suits them well. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but the seem to be service and support organizations. This is where the money is apparently and with the price pressures moving downward, why not?!

Now, what about nextanalytics Open Source model? To begin, nextanalytics doesn’t have software that’s usable by most end users. We do have some user interfaces but they're more for data-geeks. The main core-value is that it is a software component that’s used in conjunction with other software.

Hence, it’s difficult for the founders to provide something such as MySQL did that’s installable and just runnable by end users. However, we have uploaded a great deal of Source Code to CodePlex. And, following the MySQL model, it’s available for the community to enhance.

That’s how MySQL got started.