Chapter 1. Getting Started

This is a very interesting time for open source. As soon as a novel concept is put forth by enthusiasts, new functionality is included into software that changes our lives, and a lot of it is built on open source technology. Having been an open source advocate for some time now, I have seen a phenomenal amount of change and progress in the quality and quantity of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. From the thoughtful minds of professional software developers, engineers, and hobbyists, tools have sprung up to support a number of disciplines, including programmers, authors, office staff, teachers, students, media, and graphic designers. While there was a time when there was only expensive proprietary commercial software available to use to perform particular tasks, now there are a lot of new and free alternatives based on OSS.

Open source projects start, and also die, all the time. Each project starts to address what a user, or group of users, perceives as a relative shortcoming in the current computing landscape. While OpenOffice.org was derived from StarOffice to address the lack of an open source office suite, Mozilla has grown from the ashes of Netscape to compete with Internet Explorer, leading to the creation of Firefox, which not only has provided an alternative to IE but has revitalized the browser wars, even garnering attention to its commercial competitor Opera. And there is no end to the innovations that PERL and PHP have brought about.

Even non-free software benefits from OSS. Many different projects take portions of fully functional open source software implementations to use in their products. Commercial routers from companies such as Linksys have embedded Linux in them, and even gamers are affected as the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii were both designed to run using Linux. Mono, the open source implementation of the .Net framework, has helped with growth in the .Net community.

But there has always been one area that has been severely lacking, and that is the area of business intelligence. While there are solutions such as writing PERL or PHP scripts, these really don't leverage full fledged Business Intelligence, the idea that reports and tools can be used by businesses to make strategic decisions based on short term and long term data and trend analysis. There has not been an open source tool that really addresses this shortcoming. Crafty developers can take the long approach and write scripts and programs that automate data reporting tasks, but this is a long and complicated process. Proprietary software for doing reporting tasks do exist, such as the report developer inside Microsoft Access for reporting off Access databases, Crystal Reports, and larger offerings such as Business Objects. These are tools that have been built to automate reporting tasks such as data retrieval, sorting, aggregation, and presentation into a format that is meaningful to the user. Such tools have been lacking in the open source community, and have only begun to gain speed in the last few years.