Should the Analyzer Plugin (not open source) be in the default Spoon build

[dmoran]

The visualization aspect of the changes to Spoon to support the Pentaho Agile BI initiative presents an interesting challenge. Currently the best visualization tool that we have at Pentaho is Pentaho Analyzer (formerly LucidEra's ClearView.) The first milestone of Agile BI, which is now available, includes Spoon with a special build of Analyzer. As such, the current download can no longer be called open source. This has repercussions like not being able to host it on SourceForge.net or maybe offending someone.

After some internal debate, we believe that we need to support both including Analyzer, as well as supporting a fully open source option. Our current plan is to use the plugin architecture that was added to Spoon in the first milestone to allow the visualization to be changeable. This would allow JPivot and eventually PAT to be used instead.

The next question is how should Spoon be packaged? Fully open source with the ability to drop in Analyzer or with Analyzer included by default and have the ability to remove it?

We are sensitive to the fact that this may be an issue for people and would like to talk about it now and get some good community feedback early in the development cycle. If you are passionate about this topic, please give your opinion. If you really don't care, and think there are better things we can be worrying about, let us know that too. Also - Pentaho is not licensed to open source Analyzer so that would not be an option worth discussing.

Doug

[bamaer]

I prefer a fully open source CE with the possibility to add closed source functionality.
As things are now, it is easy to make a clear distinction between an open source CE and an EE with closed source components. Adding closed source components to the core CE will blur this distinction.
Apart from keeping a clear difference between CE and EE, having a project in the CE that is not fully open source will mean either the entire CE has to be moved away from SF, or Pentaho and the community will have to start explaining people the CE is open source and on SF, except for PDI that can't be hosted there because it is open source-ish but does contain some closed source software.

Of course the Analyzer is a great tool, and users should be able to change to it as their default visualization technology as easily as possible. A mechanism to change the visualization technology of choice to Analyzer could later be used to change other (PDI) component technologies as well.

In the long run, the CE can only benefit from extra functionality. It doesn't matter if this functionality is open or closed source, but IMHO the default distribution should be open. My 2 cents...

Regards,

Bart

[Roland.Bouman]

Like Bart, I would prefer the download to be 100% open source.
The model where you download and have to uninstall / remove functionality before it's 100% open source again is IMO a very bad idea.

The ability to load something like visualization via a plugin would of course be awesome

kind regards,

Roland

[carloz]

I agree with Roland and Bart: the CE spoon build should stay 100% open. It doesn't make much sense imho to download something and then have to remove a part of it to have it back open again.

The plugin option is of course the best one. As far as this is something that will be only available in the future, you may have the open spoon build on sourceforge, and the "agilebi-spoon" with the analyzer downloadable directly from pentaho.com (ie the way you're doing now ;-). Clear documentation should explain the situation, the differences between the two versions, ...

Once the analyzer will be ready as a spoon plugin, I expect the end user to be able to install (and uninstall) it at any time, and he will have to be informed that he's moving away from 100% opensource.

I personally like a lot the way Ubuntu deals with a similar situation: if you want to install proprietary drivers (like Nvidia Video Cards ones), you have to enable some extra repositories, and it is made very clear that those drivers are proprietary when you install them.

I'm a long term Debian fan as well, but I perfectly understand that opensource "radicalism" brings important market / business values limitations (that's why LGPL and her friends were born in fact ;-)

ciao
carloz

[jvdongen]

I agree with all previous repliers; Spoon CE should remain open. Having a separate download for an Analyzer plugin would be best imho.

best, Jos

[ingo.klose]

I support the views expressed in the previous post. PDI as full OS download and the option to download and install the Visualizer plug-in separately.

Regards,
Ingo

[pstoellberger]

i agree with the previous postings as well

[bugg_tb]

I'd like the moon on a stick please.

[dmoran]

Wooden stick?

[codek]

wow, i'm surprised at some of those responses, i guess a lot of people either get heavily involved in the source, or have been burnt by mixed offerings in the past, I guess with other products.

I also wonder whether those people against it have seen the webex about the agile line of work - the analyzer does add great features, and simply reading about them doesnt do it justice.

However i do see there's a need for pentaho to be very clear in this area, therefore it does seem to be sensible to keep the CE version 100% open.

Thats not to say though, that the plugin for the analyzer and other plugins shouldnt be made very very visible, and extremely simple to install. In fact, you could even offer to install it automatically in some way (with the disclaimer that some people want about it not being os)

Being a customer, and using EE software, of course I can't formally comment on this! But sticking my nose in anyway

[bugg_tb]

Codek, haven't you just summarized what everyone else said?

[codek]

nope, not really!

[Peter Schmidt]

I will probably be re-iterating what has already been stated below. As an EE customer, it is obvious that the functionality in analyzer is presently leaps and bounds ahead of the other mondrian front-ends. I know that it is not up for discussion to make the analyzer code open to the community. I do think that it needs to be determined if the analyzer product, not the code will be available to non EE customers. I agree that the CE version should be 100% open source, such that the line is clear. As a result, the ability to plug-in to the appropriate front-end (PAT, JPivot, Analyzer, something else) needs to be extremely trivial to the end-user (perhaps just some
select box configuration that then pulls down the source and has you up and running).

Just my 2-cents,

Peter

[boyrock]

Normal practice out there is to separate the non-open source portions. It prevents legal issues and also prevents the open portions from being eroded into "closed" source.

Whilst the plugin may be fantastic, that doesn't mean some of us want to be forced to now spend real money when before we just spent staff hours