I’m constantly amazed at how no one calls SugarCRM on their deceptive open source license. Cliffs Notes: They call it open source, but it by no means qualifies as such and OSI will never certify it because doesn’t meet the definition of open source! Apparently, because they’ve got a bunch of money no one made a stink when they switched their license, and went from a legitimate “open source” company to well, shareware type license.

Matt Asay (smart, sharp, open source advocate) thinks it’s copacetic (check out the thread here). Is SugarCRM allowed to change the definition of open source to suit their own business model? Am I the only one willing to say without any standard (OSI) the term open source will become dilluted and viewed with skepticism?

PS – I think I’m just being awnry now… I should lay off it I suppose… Or invite John Roberts to have a beer and see if he can convince this skeptic it’s not shareware.

What’s so special about this graph? Well, other than the fact that it’s a really cool way to translate an XML document into a visual HTML report (this isn’t an image, it’s actually an HTML document) the technologies used to produce it are REALLY compelling. Chris Harrington and I spent a couple of hours this morning, working to generate a few reports using both of our “technology stacks” and with just a few small adjustments we were able to do something that spells big potential.

Let me first describe exactly how this chart was built:

• An XMLA request was passed OVER THE INTERNET (from Pittsburgh to Seattle) from the ThinOLAP command line XMLA client to a Mondrian instance I have running in my lab.
• The XMLA request was parsed and passed to the Mondrian ROLAP server that issued JDBC calls to my BizGres database.
• My BizGres database executed a handful of SQL statements that Mondrian used to generate the actual data values for the MDX query passed from across the country.
• The XMLA response was sent back OVER THE INTERNET (from Seattle to Pittsburgh) to the ThinOLAP command line.
• The ThinOLAP then did a post processing XSLT transformation to take the boring XMLA results (ie, pure data) and turn it into a really compelling chart.

Why is this exciting?

First off, because it’s using XML for Analysis which was supposed to be a hot ticket item, but has less than stellar support from vendors (including the 8000 lb guerrilla that “supports” the standard). There are a handful of XMLA clients, almost ALL of which are tied up in “dot net this” and “dot net that” and are clearly written to work with SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. Mondrian happens to be the only other PUBLIC/PRODUCTION OLAP server that implements the interface (if the other vendors are actually public with their XMLA providers please let me know on email). We proved that the standard is pretty sound and that with small amounts of tweaking interoperation is pretty straightforward! UPDATE: I’ve just read that HYPERION has a provider, but I’m uncertain of how useful it is in practice. It also appears that SAS has a provider but again I’m not sure if there any clients that aren’t fused to the existing MS technologies (OLEDB etc).

Secondly, because it’s running over the Internet at pretty respectable speeds. Between two remote offices the REQUEST/RESPONSE was reasonable (a couple of seconds). This is one of the first times I’ve actually received some benefit from a SOA perspective over the Internet. Chris and I figured it was HTTP, there was no need shipping software back and forth we just did some port forwarding and it all worked BRILLIANTLY. We proved that XMLA can work, reasonably, over the public internet.

Thirdly, the server side is 100% OSI Certified software. That’s right… my provider was serving up OLAP goodies using Linux, Tomcat, Mondrian (part of the Pentaho platform), and BizGres. There were ZERO proprietary applications running to build and deliver the XMLA responses. The XMLA client (ThinOLAP) is an freeware product that uses from Microsoft packages for XML processing, scripting, transformations, etc. We proved that one can build an open source OLAP solution that can be leveraged by whizbang clients.

Beyond open source, Mondrian is a JDBC ROLAP server so it can be plugged into just about any database that supports JDBC. Choice is GOOD! Oracle anyone? The potential of actual interoperating XMLA clients is HUGE! Think about how many boutique visualization, charting, and reporting engines have been fused to OLE DB and other proprietary protocols. Perhaps a handful interoperating clients/servers will entice the others to write to the actual standard?

Chris and I continue to work at seeing what potential exists for interoperating his Intrasight Product with Mondrian. If you’re interested in using Mondrian or a nice AJAX client for Mondrian please don’t hesitate to be in touch with either of us in this regard.

Well, apparently I must not be alone in my disapproval of Ingres choosing GPL. I just noticed the following notice on the Ingres Licensing page:

Important Notice on GPL Licensing
Posted February 12, 2006
We have had significant feedback from many of you who would like to bundle access or include the Ingres access technologies (JDBC, ODBC, .Net, OpenAPI, ESQL etc.) with your non-GPL products, or link with these technologies, but are concerned about the viral aspects of the GPL.

We understand this important customer/partner requirement and are working to make this possible without limiting the needs of GPL partners and customers, or for end customers to get support.

I value this feedback from the Ingres community and the level of interest in using Ingres as an embedded or bundled database in applications as diverse as appliances, printers, and ERP solutions. Please check back in the next few days for an update on this topic.

To receive email updates on this topic, please email info@ingres.com with the subject GPL.
Dev Mukherjee
Chief Marketing Officer
Senior Vice President of Business Development

Hopefully this will be one of those cases where the community gives tough love, and it turns out in the best long term interest of the project. We’ll see!

I met with the CTO of a company leveraging open source projects to build a compelling offering in the BI/DW space. Their secret sauce is staying closed source, but they are contributing some good stuff back to the core projects which they are leveraging.

We were discussing the dual licensing GPL/Commercial strategy and he put it quite nicely:

For business focused projects that have little or no value to hobbyist projects, it’s almost antagonistic offering GPL

This echoes my thoughts on the Ingres move to GPL. Business focused open source projects know that they have to exist in an economy of open and closed source applications so offering a GPL version of their project could be considered insulting! In practice, it becomes shareware (try for free, but use for money). For instance, Ingres corporation is saying that you are free to use our database if your product is GPL. This is like offering a scholarship to an underprivileged inner city youth for a PhD program in Astro Physics when they only just passed their GED. They can claim they are being benevolant but they know that student will never get accepted to the program.

My advice to “business focused” open source projects: If you want to flourish, you must have a business friendly license otherwise your community will not arrive. The hobbyists don’t need advanced business workflow processing, and companies that could invest in your technology won’t because they need business friendly licenses.

MySQL works because it actually benefits the community because “Joe’s MP3 collection manager” does need a simple database for it. MySQL is on the “cusp” of a business application. There is a reasonable value add for MySQL in GPL and vice versa.

I’m continually amazed at how the words “open source” and the actual practice of “open source” are getting twisted, turned, mauled, and misused to make a buck. It’s entirely possible for someone to choose GPL and not build a great open source project… Community (developers, companies, users) is the secret sauce so your license, posture, philosophy must engage your potential or existing community with the idea that getting some invested in your project (ie, hard working hours of coding, testing, and leveraging your project) will far surpass any tricky antics to force people to pay you some money.