I see that Pentaho wants to charge me for their software. How can I get to the underlying Open Source software for dashboards to see what it can do without having to deal with Pentaho marketing folks?
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Most commercial open source editions have a community edition that the community hacks on if the license permits it*. Pentaho is no different from them and has a community edition.
In these cases, the "community edition" is not the same thing as the commercial product you would buy. You may find a lot of the gloss and even some, if not a lot of the features are missing. There's no support. Yadda yadda yadda. You get the picture.
*As others have noted, not all "open source" apps need to distribute the source code in the same way as, a GPL application would. Open source, in rawest forms, just means as a licensed user, you get to see the source code.
Oli
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Just to provide detail on what pentaho do and dont provide - they do provide a very complete BI platform as part of the community edition.
The only things that the enterprise edition include are a web based dashboard designer and a few other bits and bobs - i.e. not very much at all.
As mentioned above the benefit to becoming a subscription customer with pentaho is that they provide support, which for us was very useful in our final implementation.
Check out their forums too though - they are very active, and as long as your questions arnt complete newbie ones they are very helpful too. I sometimes use the forums despite having a support agreement as i know it can be quicker.
Codek
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"Open source" is not the same thing as "free" (either "as in beer" or "as in speech").
As much as I'm not a fan of Stallman in general, this article will probably help clear up the distictions a bit: Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software
Chad Birch
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1free speech isn't even as free as people tend to think it is. woo! off-topic political discussion! – DevinB May 12 '09 at 18:57
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4You can't say that here! This isn't a designated Free Speech Zone! – Chad Birch May 12 '09 at 18:59
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Suds get your free download of the code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/
They have an IRC chat channel as well that ive found to be extremely helpful.
Kirby
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Open Source != Free
IANAL, but I'd say you're bound to the license that the software is under.
Daniel Sloof
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