Roman Stanek

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COSS BI: Open Source, Open Core or Openly Naked?

In BI, OSS, SaaS on November 17, 2009 at 9:27 am

Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure of Commercial Open Source Software.” Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued.

I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure just because there are few successful exits that Peter neglected to mention. At the end of the day Peter’s comment that “selling software is miserable” is true. Every sales rep involved in selling COSS would agree (I’m interviewing many of them now). Selling COSS is no easier than selling any other form of software.

Any company using the word “open” should be able to explain the true cost of delivery (this is one of Peter’s points). And there is an obvious litmus test of openness of COSS companies: One that I would call “open pricing.” COSS companies should openly publish their price list and clearly mark what’s free and open and what’s paid and closed. Otherwise OSS is just a bait-and-switch to a familiar proprietary software tactic of customer lock-in. This is what OSS was supposed to get rid of in the first place.

Let’s take a look at some of COSS companies in the Business Intelligence space. The bait and switch is in a full swing here:

Jaspersoft: https://www.jaspersoft.com/jaspersoft-business-intelligence-suite-0 Let us prepare a custom quote for you.

Pentaho: http://www.pentaho.com/products/buy_bi_suite.php Request a Quote

Talend: http://www.talend.com/store/talend-store-inquiries.php A Talend account manager will be in touch shortly to provide information and/or a detailed quote.

We announced GoodData pricing earlier today and I would actually argue that we are a more open company than any of companies listed above. Our customers know exactly what service they get and how much it will cost.

We stick to our company motto: GoodData = BI – BS. And at there is a lot of BS going on in COSS space. It may actually be its biggest failure.

 

Full disclosure: I have been a big believer in open source since we opensourced NetBeans more than 10 years ago.

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TDWI: Independence vs. Cash

In Uncategorized on November 4, 2009 at 11:14 pm

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that “independent industry analyst” was an oxymoron. But the willingness to sell independence for cash reached a new low with TDWI’s New SaaS Business Intelligence Portal. Please visit the link and see if there is any trace of independence left…

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Will Moore’s law find it’s way to the cloud?

In cloud on October 27, 2009 at 9:28 am

Moore’s Law states that computer system performance/price ratio will double every two years. And that was very much my expectation when GoodData started using Amazon Web Services almost 2 years ago. But I had to wait until today to see Moore’s Law at work: Amazon announced 15% drop of EC2 prices. The price of the small Linux instance was constant at $0.10 per hour for the last two years – now it will be $0.085.

15% in 2 years – not exactly the exponential growth in the performance/price curve that I expected. And I started to wonder why. Here are my two explanations – I believe the second one is more likely:

  1. AWS prices were set way too low to attract developers two years ago. Moore’s Law helped the price to catch up with the real cost of running the cloud.
  2. AWS is a monopoly and Moore’s Law does not apply.

What? Cloud and monopoly? Isn’t utility computing a perfect example of fiercely competitive commodity where the price curve is shaped only by demand/supply? What would Nick Carr say? Unfortunately not. As much as we read about different cloud providers, AWS is the only real provider of “infrastructure as a service” in town. If you don’t want to be locked-in to proprietary Python or .Net libraries there is not that much choice.

Until we will see performance/price of AWS double every two years, we should still wonder about monopolistic pricing.

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