This "burn commercial open source companies on the stake" mantra is getting a bit tiresome.
In the end, these companies are usually very involved in their respective communities and usually invest a lot of money in open source software development.

Just like you might have an annoying hot-shot developer in your community it might be worth the trouble or not. However, just mindlessly bashing all companies just because they might have interests that conflict is just a little over the top.

There's a very simple method to evaluate open source companies: how much code is being released under an open source license? From where I'm looking at it, that's what's important, everything else is BS.

Now obviously, if you see a benevolent company that invests and supports your favorite open source projects with money, man-power, forums, VCS and so on, why would you be critical of that deal just because the company might be making money? If it's mutually beneficial it's a good deal regardless.

Well, it works on my Android box and I had fun trying commands like "POKE 53281,0". It's pure nostalgia. Why would they even want to deny anyone that experience?

Mmmpf, it would be interesting to see if this one worked: http://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64 A JavaScript C64 emulator. I mean, what's the point. The instance you try to block something, people are going to look for ways around it. If that's too much of a hassle, they go elsewhere. I don't get the logic behind it on behalf of Apple.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the parent poster. However, ... every mf time I see that answer it pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. Am I the only one that finds it completely ridiculous and an insult to everyones intelligence that Apple calls C64 Basic a real programming language in this day and age? The only possible realistic usage is for hobby purposes. WTF! What a waste!

You're absolutely right, I'm totally arrogant. Try answering over seven thousand posts on the Kettle forums. My apologies in any case.

As for typing ETL or Data Integration in Google: you should try it.

You also seemed to mis the point that I did in fact reach the student in question by spending my spare time speaking at the open source conference, for free. The presentation I gave there was in fact tailored to people that don't know any data integration tools. The point I was trying to make was that efforts where you reach 50 or even a few hundred people at a time don't even make a dent in the huge crowd that doesn't know or doesn't *want* to know about even the possibility of using a data integration tool to get a job done, let alone an open source data integration tool. Without multi-million dollar marketing campaigns I wouldn't know what to do about it.

It's unfortunate but experience tells us that unless you sweeten the deal with extras like documentation, configuration/monitoring/EE software, repositories and the like, very few companies would buy anything. That experience is contrary to what I once believed.

So you can complain that you can't get your hands on nice documentation, the dashboard designer or the console, all part of the enterprise edition. However, when you really compare it to closed source software it's still a lot cheaper. This analyst report shows the difference: http://www.pentaho.com/lower_bi_costs/ Heck, you can get all that for free for 30 days to test-drive things.

The lack of consultants *is* a problem. However, there's Pentaho related work to be found out there and with 2 Pentaho books out and a third coming out in September I'm sure the problem is short-lived.

Thanks for the thumbs up. Just a not thought: everything that is possible with the commercial (Enterprise Edition) version of Pentaho software is possible with the community edition. Please don't confuse use with certain other "Open Source" BI suites.

To stay on topic I would advice you to simply buy one of the Pentaho books before you get started!

5 years ago, poor man! 5 years ago things were pretty wild. I open sourced Kettle in December 2005 so back then we weren't even with Pentaho yet.

Now we have over 40 developers and a dozen translators, a QA team, doc writers, continuous integration servers, a JIRA system, a wiki, product managers, a sales team, etc.

Thousands upon thousands of bugs have been fixed in the mean time and thousands of features have been implemented. Since then we released 27 stable versions!

2 years is indeed a long time for a startup company. In that period we released a host of new versions for the 5 product pilars, improved usability dramatically and 2 Pentaho related books came out to help you on your path (with a third on the way).

What was once only possible is now fairly straightforward too.

Kettle is a visual programming tool to do data integration. Again, if you have no need for data integration, you won't be looking for it.

Here is a link to the FOSDEM presentation itself:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://archive.fosdem.org/2008/slides/lightningtalks/fosdem08_ltalk_kettle.pdf

Actually scrop1us, posters seem to think they are making some original joke.

However... Pentaho had indeed 5 founders (penta) and (I say this with all the respect in the world for my esteemed colleagues) they have every intention of selling themselves out.

So the given definition of 5 hoes is very close to the true meaning of the word Pentaho or so I have been told one drunken evening at Pentaho's bar, the Orlando Ale House.

Maria is indeed not part of this group of 5 esteemed gentlemen.

Matt

Per, writing a ROLAP server is a non-trivial task. Mondrian is the only open source option for you at the moment. There is a MOLAP server called PALO however.

If you don't mind me saying so but on the one hand you seem to complain that a visual programming tool like Kettle is too hard to use. And at the same time you choose to ignore the tools to configure Mondrian properly. I'm sure there is some kind of pattern here.

Most people can start using Kettle in a matter of a few minutes to a few hours. I would like to argue that this is hardly the case for your duct tape solution. Your home brew SQL/Ruby/scripting mess is a great opportunity for a data integration consultant to clean up the mess once your gone or when things are no longer maintainable or adaptive. Since I've been in exactly this situation many times myself and also on behalf of other consultants: keep up the good work :-)

Matt

The simple answer is that Kettle is a generic name that is very hard to copyright. Pentaho Data Integration and Kettle are synonyms although Kettle used a bit more often to identify the open source project.

As for the pentaho.com website... you would think that the webcasts, papers, etc would be hard to miss but hey I guess if you don't need a data integration tool you probably don't know what it's for.

After I did a Kettle lightning talk at FOSDEM a few years ago I met a student who was working on a thesis. He had been gathering data in a database, originating from some electron microscope (or something like that) for the past 6 months. He said if he had known about Kettle he could have done it in a few weeks at most. The problem is that reaching certain non-technical audiences is a very tough call. Heck, it's even hard to convince those people that claim it's faster to code it all in Java/C/C++/Perl/Ruby or even bf. (see other threads below)

According to the law of my country (Belgium) and Germany, Scientology is not a religion.
In order for anyone to expose that they are not a religion, you do indeed need dissenters, not die hard fans.

I think you owe the people in Germany an apology for that last comment you made but hey, it's your karma (and I don't mean /. karma).

I'm sure in the real world you wouldn't be man enough to say all those horrible things in person.

Me being a happy KDE 4.3.5 user and looking at the speed of development of KDE in general, I would say your comments are seriously off the mark. Enough said.

Oh trust me, there's plenty of people who think KDE's reputation is just fine. What does that mean ayway? If you fail at first, you can always try harder a second time. And a third time and a fourth time, until you get it right.

You sound like Ricky Bobby in Talladega nights: "If you ain't first you're last!". Well at least in the movie I knew it was meant to be funny.