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Open Source DW Meeting in SF This Week

There's going to be an open source session with some presentations, demos and networking at the Silicon Valley TDWI chapter meeting on Thursday, February 28 from 2:00 - 5:30 in San Francisco. This event is open to the public (and it's free!) but you do need to register first.

The announcement and agenda is listed below:

Attention All Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Professionals in the Silicon Valley Area

We cordially invite you to attend our upcoming TDWI Silicon Valley Chapter meeting on February 28, 2008. Come meet other local BI/DW professionals, swap business cards, share ideas, and exchange career advice while listening to quality presentations in a vendor-neutral setting, which is the hallmark of TDWI events. TDWI Chapter meetings are open to all BI/DW professionals and are FREE of charge. In addition, when you attend a TDWI Chapter meeting, you are eligible for a 10% discount towards a new, renewed, or extended TDWI Membership. Don't forget the prizes! At each event our sponsors graciously donate fantastic prizes. Past giveaways include Apple iPods, TVs, DVD Players, and more. Please see the agenda below.

When: Thursday, February 28, 2008, 2:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Where:
A.P. Giannini Theater at the Bank of America Building
555 California Street, San Francisco, CA
(Theater is on the ground floor off the California Street Entrance)

Agenda:
2:00 - 2:25 p.m. Mingle with your colleagues over light refreshments
2:30 - 2:45 p.m. Welcome, Chapter Intro, TDWI Goals
2:45 - 3:15 p.m. The State of Open Source BI - Mark Madsen
3:25 - 3:45 p.m. Vendor Demo - JasperSoft
3:45 - 4:05 p.m. Vendor Demo - Talend
4:05 - 4:20 p.m. Networking Break
4:20 - 5:15 Panel Discussion on Open Source Software moderated by Mark Madsen. The panel includese professionals from JasperSoft, Pentaho, and Talend as well as other users of Open Source technology.
5:15 - 5:20 p.m. Close

Labels: BI, business intelligence, etl, open source, oss

Posted by Mark Tuesday, February 26, 2008 2:28:00 PM | permalink | (1) comments

Time for Open Source Think Tank 2008

The third annual Open Source Think Tank hosted by the Olliance Group and DLA Piper starts tomorrow in Napa Valley, CA. This is an invitation-only event for leading open source thinkers to collaborate on ways to resolve commercial open source issues. I'm looking forward to the sessions, though I wonder if discussion will be dominated by the MySQL and Yahoo acquisitions. It's not off-topic, but I'm hoping that things stay on track for the primary topic, the future of commercial open source, rather than current mergers and acquisitions.

One problem I've seen with lots of writing about open source companies is that somehow, because it's open source, it must always be non-profit. While I personally believe there should always be a matching, freely downloadable version to what is offered under subscription, I don't think that means you can't sell closed software to supplement the open software. "Commercial" and "open source" are not opposite ends of the spectrum, they're orthogonal.

I've been seeing resistance to open source adoption above the infrastructure layer. Lots of reasons having to do with FUD, but some good valid ones too. Skillsets is a big one.

The thing is, why is skills a problem, when we find skills for other development / IT jobs? I think this is a symptom, and the real disease is the lack of finishing in OSS applications. Some are good, but many others involve several packages, and there are version incompatibilities, and you quickly run into problems that require knowing Apache + Tomcat or Jboss + perl or Java, etc. ad nauseum.

Heck, I've had that problem with using two different Business Objects products which under the hood deploy on open source technologies. It's pretty bad when even a COTS vendor is having troubles - their answer was, run these two applications on different servers because the Tomcat versions are incompatible.

Until the applications install and run as promised without worrying about dependency ugliness and conflicts, as well as polished documentation and troubleshooting manuals, I think OSS applications will stay in the underdog category.

Labels: open source think tank, oss

Posted by Mark Wednesday, February 06, 2008 10:22:00 PM | permalink | (1) comments