Comment on No open source decision needed for Pentaho by Dan Brickley

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The fundamental mismatch is mostly around branding and culture. Pentaho calls itself “opensource” yet when one visits http://www.pentaho.com/download/ to download the software, the only options available are those flagged as ’30 day free trials’. While I’m sure if I dig around and search I can probably find the opensource files, the design of the downloads page makes it very clear that easy unmediated access to the raw source code is something that the company lacks enthusiasm for. Which in turn gives rise to an expectation that the opensource aspect is shrinking and endangered, and that the word is used more in a marketing sense.

Exactly the same codebase and license choices, presented differently, could give a very different ‘feel’ and raise different expectations about likely future behaviour.



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