I was pondering things this morning when I hit upon the problem, its the mentality of the open source end user.... When I sit in a presentation and ask nicely for end users to throw a bit of time in our direction, do I seriously expect an influx of willing volunteers? No, not really. Why?
Well I am as much to blame as anyone else when it comes to using Open Source software and when finding a bug or problem, actually attempting to fix that bug, if it involves me downloading the bi server source, and debugging in Eclipse, then you can pretty much forget it, I haven't go the time, I tell myself, I have better things to be getting on with, I tell myself, unless its a blocker in which case I may make half an attempt to solve it, then give up and get everyone to vote for it on jira, so why should I expect that mentality to be any different towards PAT? Well, I don't.
Apart from a few translations, Gretchens BI Server plugin and a few other bits and pieces, which I am very grateful for, we haven't had a single bug fix or patch come our way, as I presume everyone sits there and goes... oh, it will be done at some point, then we can start using it.....
And to be honest, I don't blame you ;)
Tom
Friday, 9 October 2009
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7 comments:
Well, it's just code now isn't it? It will get better once you have a usable product. And code only goes so far anyway. Good ideas, input and direction are at least as important.
Oh yeah, maybe my post came across wrong, it wasn't a swipe at people or the lack of other people volunteering, and wasn't really aimed at PAT it was just a good example of things I have noticed over the last few years about my mentality and the problems you real developers face when starting and open source project. As Doug pointed out on the IRC channel a while ago about the number of actual community based Patchers and Bug fixers you actually had when compared to 'end users'
well, the other piece of the puzzle is as you mentioned, the complexity of the build process.
For instance, I think PDI gets a bunch of people contributing small things here and there (steps, minor patches, icons, bug squashing). I'm one of those "everyone once in a while" contributors. Why? Because Matt has made it easy to contribute casually. Download into Eclipse, Set to AutoBuild, Run Spoon class.
Pentaho on the other hand is pretty difficult to even think about doing incremental development. Their build process might work great for them (I think it does, actually!) but it doesn't surprise me in the least that people who might be willing to put 2 or 3 days in to "scratch their Pentaho itch" don't. Why spend 2 days building a Pentaho dev environment to write a plugin that may be a day or so of work?
Fair point nick, that is very true, even I've tried to write PDI plugins before...
Same things happen with bigger projects Tom. Power*Architect has over a thousand downloads a week, many users using it in government institutions and big business, yet we have a lot less actual contributors than we would expect.
I can't write Java. But i can make a cracking pot of tea!
If someone would help me build a virtual machine using Ubuntu that contains a complete and correctly configured build environment complete with server and examples that illustrate PAT, I will release it and maintain it as new versions come out. This would eliminate the whole hassle of setting up the environment just to work with 10% of what really interests people and encourage a lot of build efforts.
Eliminate the PITA problems and I think people will come tinker around plenty. It can be built with completely free and opensource software and OS, there's no excuse.
Call the thing "Pentaho BI Suite Community Development Edition".
Make it stupid easy to build things. Let me tinker with a few lines of code and then try to build and try it out.
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