For the last ten years, I’ve been partially obsessed with the notion that the formula for creating economic value needs to be updated. I’ve worked in the technology industry for 26 years and I’ve seen information systems radically change the landscape of competition and value creation. My most recent article on this topic appears in Forbes under the same title as this post.
Because this article represents just a fraction of my thoughts on this matter, I’d like to revisit the basic premise, which is captured in the excerpt below, and then describe how some of my current experiences at Jaspersoft corroborate this newly posited IT-driven economic theory.
“Classical economic theory describes three primary factors, or inputs, to the production of any good or service: land, labor, and capital. These factors facilitate production, but do not become part of the end product (as a raw material would). While these three factors have been much discussed and extended at different points in economic evolution, I believe that they, in any of the advanced economies of the world today, are vastly antiquated.
Sometime even prior to this new millennium, the primary factors of production have now assuredly become: Time, Information and Capital. I submit that the primary relevance of land and labor has diminished, not completely but measurably, from their prominence during agrarian and industrial economic times. In a sense, owning land and employing lots of people no longer highly correlate to a valuable and successful enterprise. Although in certain industries these two factors will remain prominent (think mining and energy production, for example). By and large, land and labor have yielded to two more important factors – time and information.”
I was very pleased when Silicon Angle asked to speak with me about my background and the thoughts that led to this newly posited IT-driven economic theory as well as the contributions Jaspersoft is making to this new economic landscape. I discussed how Jaspersoft’s mission is precisely to help its customers compete on the basis of time and information.
“From its very start, Jaspersoft was determined to build and advance the industry’s most modern, flexible, and scalable Business Intelligence (BI) software. To do this, we consciously chose the open source model of development and distribution, believing that the power and principles of community involvement and broad usage would prove continually more valuable (and it has). We knew time would be important to our business model to rapidly compete in a crowded software category.”
Jaspersoft focuses on delivering its modern BI software to those who are best suited to create value from it. We call these individuals “BI Builders” because they possess a powerful confluence of knowledge about data, analytics, and business (process, function, industry, etc.) that truly yields new value from insight. The result is thousands of commercially available software applications that include Jaspersoft technology. These software applications power the world and deliver faster, more effective insight into data. Jaspersoft’s open source model affords these applications very high quality reporting and analytic capabilities at a very low cost, so our customers create new economic value, arguably, where it could not have been created in the past.
In many ways, the BI Builder is the real hero in the equation that determines how companies can compete more effectively based on time and information. Jaspersoft simply becomes their partner and enabler.
Here’s a chance to continue this dialog at the intersection of economic theory and information technology. I offer an open invitation for comments. Your thoughts are appreciated.
I’ve been writing about how important it is to build and deliver big data projects that can succeed, because the opportunity to do so has never been better and the business reasons to do so have never been more compelling. Seems like each week, more tools and products are available to make big, complex data types useful for a variety of business purposes.
But, what about the unforgiving worlds of natural language and semi-structured data sources? Is there any hope to generate insight from them, even in this new big data world?
It’s one thing to make sense of more traditionally structured big data sources; its quite another to parse natural language and complex, industry-specific data types. To quickly understand the difficulties of these data environments, I recommend Brett Sheppard’s excellent blog post on this topic.
Informatica’s HParser to the Rescue
Enter Informatica’s HParser, announced last week. Now, accessing and then making sense of practically any data type has just become far simpler. You can learn more about this important new Informatica product here. HParser is a parsing technology that can run inside a MapReduce job and which allows users to structure the unstructured or semi-structured data in Hadoop and ready it for analysis. This takes a lot of the complexity out of creating custom scripts, which is what developers need to do today. HParser is available in both a community and commercial edition and features a visual development environment that, when combined with its myriad out-of-the-box parsers for semi-structured industry standard data, can eliminate up to 80% of the time it takes to turn this data into insight.
Integration with Jaspersoft
I’m thrilled that Jaspersoft has collaborated with Informatica to deliver rich reporting and analysis of natural language and semi-structured data, working directly with Informatica’s new HParser. Through integration with Jaspersoft’s BI server, creating any variety of reports and analyses is drag-and-drop easy. You can learn more about our work together through this brief video.
In short, we’ve worked with Informatica to ensure the Jaspersoft BI platform can provide analytic access to Hadoop for anyone who needs to access and understand data - whether its an executive who wants a summarized dashboard or a manager who needs a detailed operational report. And, our BI platform can handle both batch processing (through Hive) as well as direct, ad hoc and near real-time access to this data, which we uniquely provide through direct HBase access. That should satisfy even the most analytic end user.
Now there’s no reason not to consider any big data source. Toward the goal of genuinely harnessing the opportunity all this new (big) data represents, it’s good to see Informatica and Jaspersoft help lead the way. Your comments are appreciated.
Will we look back at 2011 and think of it as “the year of Big Data”? This does feel like the year when organizations can genuinely take advantage of the opportunity presented by big data - harnessing its volume, variety and velocity - in both concept and implementation.
The venture capital and investment community has been betting with its wallet. During the first three quarters of 2011, several high-profile acquisitions occurred and at least one dozen new, early stage investments were made. The key theme is big data analytics and the goal is big insights that drive new business decisions (presumably, decisions that couldn’t have been made without leveraging that big data).
The problem is that, currently, big data analytics is fraught with far too much data and far too little analytics. Should this continue without a more intelligent way to connect to and actually use all this data, the result will often be project failure.
The next generation of big data connectors must be more intelligent, providing views into these vast swaths of data, so the opportunity for big insights can be more commonly realized. Jaspersoft’s recent work and announcement this week with IBM and its InfoSphere BigInsights product take a major step in this direction.
IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
Building on the Apache Hadoop open source framework, IBM InfoSphere BigInsights adds administrative, workflow, provisioning, and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities. The IBM software package comes in a Basic Edition (freely downloadable) and an Enterprise Edition. The Basic Edition includes the complete Apache Hadoop install, a web-based management console, and pre-built integration with IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM Smart Analytics System, and DB2. The Enterprise Edition goes on to include text analytics capabilities with a rules engine, a spreadsheet-like browser-based tool (called BigSheets) for data exploration and job creation, a metric-driven scheduler, large scale indexing, a JDBC connector, LDAP support, and a query language that enables analysis of structured and non-traditional data types (called Jaql).
Finding insight from within all the data can be challenging. The BigInsights toolset is made far more useful with a modern, powerful BI server out in front of it. So, IBM’s partnership with Jaspersoft provides this critical component of a complete Big Data analytics solution.
2nd Generation “Intelligent” Connectors
Connecting to a Hadoop-class data source is only useful if done intelligently. Running a query that returns millions of rows (and columns) of data probably won’t answer the business question being posed. Intelligently interrogating the data structure during the query is necessary. To accomplish this, Jaspersoft has delivered a 2nd generation connector for the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights platform. This connector builds incrementally on providing data access via Hive and it builds exponentially on allowing direct and intelligent access to HBase. The Jaspersoft connector supports filters, delivers greater performance and usability, and enables yet unseen flexibility for interacting with Big Data.
1. Filters: Because HBase has no native query language, there’s no automatic filtering capability. But there are filtering APIs. The new Jaspersoft connector not only supports simple filters (e.g., StartRow and EndRow) but also supports a wide array of complex filters (like RowFilter, FamilyFilter, ValueFilter, SkipValueFilter, and so on). In fact, the universe of supported Apache Hadoop filters is listed here.
2. Performance & Usability: In addition to the systems monitoring and management niceties provided by IBM, a Jaspersoft HBase query can specify exactly the ColumnFamilies and/or Qualifiers that are to be returned. This is particularly helpful for query performance tuning and usability, in that some HBase users have very wide tables, so accessing just the necessary fields offers a much faster and more usable solution.
3. Flexibility: To unpack data from HBase and make sense of it within a reporting tool, Jaspersoft’s connector supports a deserialization engine framework. The connector automatically understands HBase’s shell and Java default serializations. Then, a customer can plug in existing or customized Java deserializers so the connector will automatically convert from HBase’s raw bytes into meaningful data types. This delivers flexible support for the widest array of data within Hadoop’s HBase environment.
We’ve truly come a long way from the earliest days of Apache Hadoop, moving beyond the technical elite, on to the IT team (thanks to IBM) and now on to the business user (thanks to Jaspersoft). The result of Jaspersoft’s integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is a complete Big Data solution, including the ability to manage and process large volumes of data and the ability to extract key information using flexible and easy-to-use reporting, dashboard and analytic views in one integrated solution. There’s plenty more to learn about Jaspersoft’s integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights.
The fastest path toward uncovering real analytic insight from Hadoop comes through a combination of proven, best-in-class software. Just in time, because the untapped potential for bold new insight from within the growing volumes of data is too big to fail.
So much has been written in the past week chronicling the life and leadership of Steve Jobs. One of my favorite articles actually distills 12 lessons from his life. No doubt, he created enormous value for his investors, customers, employees, and partners and literally enriched countless lives along the way. I hope to add another perspective to all the commentary as a nine-year Apple employee and an admirer of the drive, work ethic, and sheer productivity of what Steve was able to instill in those around him.
For me, there were three fundamental business lessons that Steve (primarily through Apple) instilled. These three lessons can be used to create value in any industry, and with Steve’s passing, I am reminded to exercise these lessons fervently in areas of my own interest (BI, open source, web-enabled applications). These lessons are important and widely applicable, but I leave it to you, the reader, to examine how they can be applied to drive superior results in areas of your own work or interest.
Long-Term Vision
In about 1989, Apple produced a short film called “Knowledge Navigator” primarily for internal use. This narrative film was set far in the future (estimated to be about 2011, by the way) and was designed to richly describe what the future of computing should be like, inspiring Apple employees to make the vision real. During the past week, this film surfaced and was heralded for its clairvoyance, because the iPad platform clearly resembles the Knowledge Navigator.
Further, this past week’s news about all-things Apple also surfaced the fact that the company applied for patents consistent with the iPad design about 5 years prior to its debut. This type of long-term vision and beyond-the-quarter determination allows breakthrough value to be envisioned and created. This lesson reminds me that we too often look for quick, simple wins that provide only small, incremental gains. Aiming too far out is frightening and wrought with risk, but nothing else creates the leaps in capabilities that define new categories. May we all summon the courage required for long-term vision when it has the potential to make lasting change.
Disruptive Innovation
For a company to succeed once, it needs to disrupt the incumbents. For a company to succeed a second time, it must disrupt itself. This axiom, first said to me by Professor Gary Hamel and then conceptually popularized by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in his book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma“, emphasizes the concept of disruptive innovation and the difficulty most successful companies face in disrupting their own success. Indeed, the economist Joseph Schumpeter originally authored the principle of creative destruction, owing its virtues to market capitalism itself.
Apple has a long history of disruptive innovation, most pointedly when Mr. Jobs was at the helm. The original Macintosh computer was a bold disruption not only to the emerging IBM-backed DOS computers of the time, but to Apple’s own products as well (the Apple II and Apple III, to be specific). Since Steve’s return, Apple has been a fountain of disruption - with the iPod alone transforming the personal electronics, music and gaming industries. Then, Apple used the basis of the iPod platform to disrupt the mobile phone market (creating the iPhone), essentially stealing it from the traditional handset manufacturers by recognizing a “smart phone” is actually a hand held, multi-network computer that happens to function as a phone when necessary. This was a radically different perspective that distinguished Apple from the incumbents.
Most recently, Apple once again disrupted itself by delivering the world’s most popular tablet computer, the iPad. Even when pundits worried the iPad could significantly cannibalize MacBook sales, Steve’s Apple powered forward - placing greater value on defining and owning a new category of post-PC computing than maintaining its own status quo. That’s using vision to innovate disruptively.
Expect Greatness
Steve’s management and leadership style has been on review since the early ‘80s. The Steve that returned to lead Apple in 1997 was a very different man than the one who left in 1985. He had learned so much in the course of his career, building NeXT and Pixar. But one thing surely didn’t change: Steve always expected greatness from himself and all those around him. In his more mercurial moments, he unwaveringly demanded greatness, believing that anything worth doing is worth doing well (or in Steve’s case, doing insanely great). Past articles have described Steve’s total undressing of an initially unsuccessful MobileMe team, replacing that team’s leader unceremoniously and immediately. Greatness had been expected but not delivered.
In that expectation lied an important leadership lesson. If you don’t expect greatness, how will it occur? Steve showed me it won’t and that sometimes the bar just has to be raised. Having the courage to raise that bar for yourself and others and not yield to mediocrity is exhausting but necessary. Without the courage of these convictions, bold long-term visions and disruptive innovations are few and far between. Expecting greatness provides the canvas upon which the bold vision and disruptive innovation can be realized.
Steve’s death endows every technology leader with a deeper sense of responsibility to create a richer, simpler and (therefore) more powerful experience for customers. We can no longer simply look to Steve’s Apple for its exclusive magic to fill the void so often left by technology companies as they deliver mediocre products into the marketplace. I hope these three fundamental lessons help pave the way.
By Brian Gentile ~ 09/27/2011 11:31. Filed under:Default.
I read on Twitter recently that talking about “mobile BI” will soon sound silly. We don’t talk about “mobile email” or “mobile calendaring”, so why should our access to critical data through reports and analytic views be any different? It shouldn’t.
The traditional BI vendors have recently put much energy into delivering mobile access techniques in their enterprise software offerings, creating an array of applications for the most popular devices. Their logic is to provide for a majority of the expected end-user features (reports, analytic views, etc.) on a mobile device but optimized for the reduced screen real estate. That sounds sufficient, right? Wrong.
Today, Jaspersoft makes available mobile BI access for the new IT world, along with a new version of our BI platform, v4.2. This new platform version delivers an array of improvements, including one of the most usable advanced filtering feature sets for ad hoc reporting and analysis that I’ve ever seen as well as support for a variety of new platforms (from app servers to databases and more). But, this release is all about mobile access - and herein lies the distinction between Jaspersoft’s approach to mobile BI and that of its traditional competitors.
Jaspersoft v4.2 delivers the BI industry’s first mobile SDK for creating native iOS (iPhone or iPad) applications. This SDK includes a sample iPhone app to enable a BI Builder to create a customized mobile application from an advanced starting point. Version 4.2 also includes elegant, fully-featured iPad enhancements that deliver a rich, browser-based experience for users of the world’s most popular tablet computer. Why did we provide mobile client capabilities in both native and browser-based formats?
Go Native
If we’ve learned anything after 8 years as a commercial open source company, it’s that our community and customers are incredibly clever and creative (BI Builders, every one of them). We know that trying to accurately predict everything that a modern BI user will want to do with a mobile computing device is not possible. By providing an iOS SDK and sample application to vastly simplify the job of creating native, custom mobile applications, we arm our customers with the tools and techniques to truly deliver a properly featured mobile app that solves their users’ needs. We expect this native approach to appeal especially to those who embed BI into other applications. Our native mobile client approach allows those embedded developers to extend and customize the feature set to suit the unique needs of their end users. Isn’t that what this new, mobile, cloud computing IT world is all about?
Native iPhone App Accessing Jaspersoft's BI Server
Simple & Consistent is Better
Because the iPad provides a lot more screen real estate than an iPhone, this device is well-served by some special browser enhancements that work exactly the way an iPad user expects. Which means multi-touch, gesture-based interaction with the full feature set of JasperReports Server entirely through a web browser. Report and dashboard creation as well as viewing and editing. Full access to the report repository (when granted by the Administrator) and multidimensional analysis for on-the-fly data exploration. All this functionality is made available simply by adhering to pure, web-based design principles. This simple, consistent method of accessing the Jaspersoft server enables the BI Builder to shine as the real hero, better satisfying the needs of the business users that require iPad tablet access to their critical data.
Browser-based iPad Access to Jaspersoft's BI Server
Mobile BI shouldn’t be different and separate.It should be normal, simple, consistent and delivered in a way that delights the user.Importantly, for mobile BI to be broadly used, it must conform to the application area of which it is part – which will likely require some integration and customization.Though the traditional BI providers have quickly delivered mobile client software, we all remember that the first email offerings weren’t the best.So Jaspersoft is pleased to extend the thinking and the model to help take mobile business intelligence to the next level.
Having the right piece of knowledge at the right time is pure gold in business. I rarely speak with a commercial Jaspersoft customer without hearing a fascinating anecdote about how they are using our BI tools to make new insight emerge quickly and affordably within their organization. Of course, this is what we are in business to provide.
The Jaspersoft Community is no different. Consequently, our open source customers need information and insight to get the most out of their experience with our projects and products. For nearly two years, we’ve talked internally about how to deliver more comprehensive knowledge to this community that is more consistent with the knowledge we’re able to deliver to commercial customers, but in a scalable, virtual manner. With the launch and availability of Self-Service Express, we’re now able to begin delivering on this goal.
Jaspersoft serves a big community. Our latest stats show more than:
14 million downloads of our product (lifetime),
230,000 registered community members,
175,000 production deployments of our tools, and
14,000 commercial customers across the globe.
This spring, we surveyed our community to learn more about its appetite for more formal, professional knowledge about Jaspersoft community products. The responses were consistent with our intuition. More than 80% of respondents declared interest in having access to better technical knowledge, even for a modest fee.
Our Community Advisory Board affirmed this interest, with member Ben Uphoff stating: “Self-Service express will help me and my team become more productive as we build reports and dashboards for our users. The enterprise search capability means we can quickly find what we are looking for and the rich documentation and customer knowledge base provide us with a lot of useful and practical how-to information.”
Self-Service Express is a clever combination of our new enterprise search engine, our fast-growing Knowledge Base, and newly-created access to all of our professional technical documentation (commonly known as “Ultimate Guides” but in a searchable PDF format). The result is this powerful yet inexpensive knowledge service that allows any Jaspersoft customer, community or commercial, to gain fast, accurate technical answers that can help drive more successful BI projects.
This is the first of a series of knowledge services that we’ve envisioned, and we look forward to more community feedback to determine which direction we go from here. Let us know what you think about Self-Service Express. In the meantime, we’ll continue to advance the knowledge components of this first service, driving greater value through insight to all those who use it.
Congratulations to Matt Geise, who was just named Jaspersoft’s Open Source Community Development leader. Matt’s job is to build, nurture, and enable a thriving Community of open source business intelligence software fanatics. It’s a big job and Matt is just the right person to lead our next generation of work with the Jaspersoft Community.
In his book, “Art of Community”, Jono Bacon declares: “Every software project, online site, or company has to manage the community of interested people surrounding it. The community is the source of new ideas, a reliable support network, and the best marketing tool.” Jono has long been a leader and advocate for successful technical communities and he always has something to say about them. You can follow his updates and thoughts here.
Those like Jono, with experience building, leading and managing technical communities, talk about the skills and methods that make those communities vibrant and healthy while recognizing that they are organic, living things. Communities need organization, leadership, enablement, nurturing, as much as they need autonomy and self-sustenance. Successfully building the community requires all of this and more. So, the chemical make-up of the community leader is vital.
Matt has always been a proud PART OF the Jaspersoft community. First as an operations manager and then as our technical customer support leader, Matt has been on the frontline with our customers and community members every day while at Jaspersoft. He knows what works and what doesn’t and he isn’t easy to please. As a fierce advocate for the community’s needs, Matt will work alongside each of our key project leaders (including Teodor Danciu and Giulio Toffoli, the leaders of JasperReports and iReport/Jaspersoft Studio, respectively). For this advocacy, Matt is already known and well respected.
Maybe most importantly, Matt has a clear but malleable vision for the next generation of Jaspersoft’s community. He will deliver big results for and with the community - because he listens and understands as often as he speaks and declares. Stay tuned for a variety of tools, programs, and projects that help take the Jaspersoft community into a new age. Matt has my thanks and congratulations . . . and he’s just getting started.
We’ve been thinking and talking about this since 2006, fundamentally driven by the belief that the Eclipse community deserves best-in-class reporting and unfettered access to a complete BI suite that doesn’t necessarily require a commercial license. To do this right, we always knew that our flagship report design tool (iReport) would need to be re-built using the Eclipse IDE and made available as both an Eclipse plug-in and a stand-alone tool. So, that’s what we’ve done.
Today, we announced Jaspersoft Studio - our new name for the Eclipse-based version of iReport. I hope you’ll want to learn more about it and visit the new project page. This is a complete re-write of iReport using Eclipse. Jaspersoft Studio v1.0 (available now) contains about 90% of the features available in the latest NetBeans version of iReport (v4.0) - and our intention is to (as quickly as possible) make the Eclipse version our primary product, with more advanced features than we’ve been able to deliver before. We’ll continue to advance and support iReport for NetBeans for some time, because this community deserves great reporting and a healthy, vibrant BI suite as well.
Why Eclipse? There are an estimated 9 million Java developers in the world today (according to Oracle) and more than half of them use Eclipse as their IDE most of the time. Although these are just estimates, there is little question about the important role Eclipse plays in Java and software development. This is an area where Jaspersoft, in total, will strive to be a helpful and forceful presence. For example, there is additional value for our BI suite community who can now build their reports and data integration jobs (using Jaspersoft ETL) within the same Eclipse framework, yielding greater simplicity in their design environment.
Finally . . . reporting for Eclipse! With this release, there was celebration at Jaspersoft and a collective exhale as we delivered something that the Jaspersoft community has asked about for some time. Beyond our limited resources and a highly-prioritized roadmap, we have a requirement to maintain high standards that we never want to compromise. So, getting to v1.0 wasn’t easy, but it was important to take the time and to get it right.
My deep thanks and gratitude are extended to the lead Jaspersoft engineers who made this happen: Giulio Toffoli, father of iReport and on-going architect of so much of what we do at Jaspersoft; Teodor Danciu, father of JasperReports our other technical founder/architect and constant collaborator with Giulio on this project; Slavic (Chicu Veaceslav), primary engineer and apprentice working with Giulio; and Yura Bablyukh, lead tester and reviewer. Soon, I’m sure, they’ll have the thanks and gratitude of the Eclipse community as well.
My message to the Eclipse Community: Try Jaspersoft Studio! It’s free, easy and powerful. With it you can do far more with your data than you can with other tools. And tell all your friends. Because we have more planned for you in the future, destined to make you an even more successful BI Builder.
I’ve spent a meaningful number of days in 2011 traveling the globe. Following on from our JasperWorld conference (February, San Francisco) and other events in the United States, I’ve met with customers and spoke at conferences in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Holland, Austria, London and Paris. In all my conversations, what I’m struck by is just how quickly third-generation business intelligence architectures are being embraced and deployed within organizations of all sizes. I find it heartening, even encouraging.
As backdrop and for further reference, I’ve written relatively extensively about the “Future of BI” and related concepts in my TDWI column, called “The BI Revolution.” You can review four specifically-related articles:
These articles describe how the growing volume of data represents real opportunity for those organizations that strategically understand how to exploit it, and that more commonly, many of these organizations are choosing to create their own analytic applications to deliver keen insight affordably to a wide business user audience.
Additionally, the new BI platforms best designed to enable these modern, scalable, and lower-cost uses are built fundamentally differently than their predecessors . . . but one thing that’s common regardless of platform generation is the rise of the real hero in the BI solution equation: the BI Builder. The BI Builder is the technical steward who manages to unite business requirements and data with BI technology, enabling greater success (and more pervasive) use of BI than what’s been typically possible in the past.
My conversations with customers and community members in each of the cities I visited provided welcome testimony that the concepts and practices described in my previous articles are, indeed, being realized. From small government and not-for-profit organizations to global 2000 corporations (and everything in between), I met with BI Builders who are uniting internal and external data and delivering new views of this data to business users who are able to make better, faster, fact-based decisions than ever before. In all these cases, the implementation costs were a small fraction of what they would have been just 5-7 years ago - while in many cases the number of users reached was large and growing, uninhibited by per-seat charges, complex user interfaces, and hard-to-maintain installations that commonly stall sizable BI deployments.
The new examples I uncovered make me proud that Jaspersoft is playing an important part in this BI revolution. And they reminded me that the future of BI really is now.
I will be describing several of these customer examples in future posts. In the meantime, I’d be interested in your feedback on my TDWI articles or any of my points here.
I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.
I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source — transparency, participation and collaboration — and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.
In the past year and up until my most recent trip to Europe two weeks ago, I’ve been talking less and less about open source software - both the conceptual model and Jaspersoft’s position as a commercial open source software company. I believe I’ve had less to talk about precisely because my predictions have been realized . . . the open source model is much better understood and open source software is now more mature and acknowledged as sufficiently capable to run even in the most mission-critical environments.
Just this week, analyst Matt Aslett posted a blog about this phenomenon and the decline of open source as an identifying differentiator among top open source companies. His assessment is spot on, and in my opinion, due to the fact that open source is no longer playing defense.
For years, the conversation around open source technologies was about “is it really as reliable, as safe, as powerful and as cheap as they claim”. By and large, these conversations have become a thing of the past, and not only are we “open sourcers” ecstatic about this, it’s also given many OSS companies the time and attention to address more of our key competitive differences beyond being open source.
Recently I’ve been spending more time with open source communities. Through global travels, I’ve met with a wide number of those participating in Jaspersoft’s community as well as community members affiliated with Talend, Acquia, Red Hat (Linux and JBoss), R (the statistical analysis language/tool) and a variety of “Big Data” communities, especially Hadoop. In most of these cases, I was delighted to witness growth and vibrancy, with community members talking proudly of what they’ve done and intend to do with these great open source products.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of “sin” going on in these open source communities. What do I mean? Glad you asked.
Open source communities thrive based on the community members donating either their time and/or money. Donating money typically comes in the form of buying or subscribing to the commercial versions of the open source products. Donating time can come in a wide variety of forms, including providing technical support for one another in forums, reviewing and commenting on projects, helping to QA a release candidate, assisting in localization efforts, and of course contributing code improvements (features, bug fixes and the like).
The sin in open source comes from contributing neither one’s time nor money.
Many of the community members with whom I recently spoke admitted to using only the open source (Community Edition) versions of the software and not contributing back in any recent or relevant way to the community and its projects. That’s the sin. If you are receiving big value through the use of a valuable open source project, great, but know that contributing back to the community is necessary to help ensure that community and open source project will continue to thrive and succeed.
So this is my plea for each community member: Contribute. Participate. Collaborate. Act transparently. In a sense, each member of an open source community should embody the principles of open source. That’s what makes this a renaissance. Your contribution is required.
