The free software movement was launched in 1983 and advocated that software ought to be free, i.e. no charge, and developers ought to be liberated to make changes, modifications, improvements, etc without obligation to any other contributor, including the originators of the software. The notion of copyright protection has no place in this brave new world. It’s complete freedom.
In 1998 a group of individuals advocated for the notion of open source software (OSS). Open source software generally allows anyone to create modifications of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it. Like free software you are at liberty to do whatever makes sense for your business.
There are many examples of successful open source projects like Linux, Apache Server and Mozilla Firefox. We use all three at expressor and like these technologies a lot. More importantly we use open source Subversion (SVN) as our versioning system in our repository and Buzilla for internal testing and bug tracking. SVN is a critical part of our software offering and under our license agreement, we can extend, modify and distribute without restriction under our GNU General Public License. As important, we don’t owe any royalties to anyone. It’s truly open.
But what’s going in our industry, the data integration business? We just read that Talend claims to have reached 10 million downloads. Unfortunately, they only have 1500 customers. But even if each of their customers generated only a little revenue shouldn’t they be cash flow positive by now and have no reason to raise venture capital money? Maybe Talend’s software isn’t really open source after all, like SVN is? Maybe what they really have is a “no charge” version of their software like so many other successful commercial software vendors have?
What perplexes me is why software companies like Talend have to say one thing and mean another. There is nothing wrong with having a limited capability version of your product and getting customers to upgrade to an “enterprise” version. This is a great business model and one we will be fully embracing later this year. Free (no charge) software allows mass adoption and community sharing of ideas, tips, remedies and workarounds. Large volumes of users find bugs faster and push the vendor to make improvements.
For the record, I do recommend that some types of data integration customers should look at genuine open source data integration software. If the customer’s users are software developers and you need to modify and extend the core intellectual property to fit your application – the way we do with SVN, then genuine open source software is a great solution.
But if you are mid-market company – like many of our customers and prospects are — with limited resources and don’t have a bunch of Java developers hanging around with free time, your best bet is to look at a vendor who can provide you with high-quality, affordable commercial software that meets your application needs.
I just thought I’d set the record straight.
Bob Potter, CEO, expressor
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2 Comments
Hi Bob!
I’m not sure you are really aware of the Talend Open Source offering… let me explain it a bit:
We have 3 main offers : Data Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management. For all of these offers, we provide Open Source softwares.
For example, for Data Integration, you can download Talend Open Studio from our website (or from SourceForge). This software competes directly with Informatica, Datastage… & Expressor. It is available for free under the GPL v2 license.
There is no limitation at all in Talend Open Studio, you can use it without any restriction (even for a commercial use) ; we have more than 450,000 users worldwide, to date.
Of course, because of the GPL license, you can modify the source code of Talend Open Studio, and “you may convey a work based on the program, or the modifications to produce it from the program, in the form of source code…” (GPL).
I usually say that we provide for free a fully featured ETL tool and we sell a Data Integration Platform of which the ETL tool is only a piece.
If you want to, and note that it is not mandatory at all, you can extend Talend Open Studio, by subscribing to our commercial offering: Talend Integration Suite which includes SLA and some additional and convenient features (full SOA support, Business Rules Management, Massively Parallel Extension, etc).
We propose the exact same model for Data Quality & Master Data Management.
Bob, I suppose, now, you understand better that the Open Source part of Talend offering is genuine Open Source and completely free!
Don’t hesitate to download it and use it for free for what you feel like!
Fabrice
Talend – COO
Fabrice:
Thanks for commenting on my post. Your offer to download your product is appreciated. We actually already have and in that sense your company is open. I also agree that you have a free (no cost) version and a more complete system that you charge money for. Here’s what perplexes me and perhaps you could answer these questions:
- since you can build apps and extend Talend (both versions), just like with expressor, why do provide source code? And what if someone alters the core system, the part that creates the executables, do you support those modifications?
- under the GPL anyone can create a derivative work and commercially sell it. I can understand why an ISV with commercial programmers would do it but why would an end user with data architects and ETL developers do it? I’ve never met an ETL developer that would have the skills to work on sophisticated infrastructure software. Wouldn’t this create a support nightmare?
- since we don’t have a MDM product, can I take yours, make some improvements and sell it? Who supports the customer?
Just to be fair I called a few of our joint SI partners and they’re not sure either. No one knows of a company that has taken your source code and has built a derivative work, the way Red Hat has with Linux or Enterprise DB has with Postgres. They’re also not sure how support works when someone with Java skills goes in and mucks around with your core IP or if you give your Open Studio customers all the source code, particularly the complicated stuff. We know you’re a successful marketing company of data integration products but with so many products and a hybrid business model, it must get confusing for customers that are just looking for affordable and easy to use software.
Bob Potter
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