Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Stay tuned
We are working to make the Quark framework and tools (as shown in the videos) available under Business Objects 'early access' Labs license. See Business Objects Labs for details. Hopefully the wait won't be too long (a week or two). In the meantime, we are expecting to share the generated HTML library documentation (within a few days).
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4 comments:
Licenses are scary; it will be neat if/when things get to some real nice OSI thing?
Yes, I understand. However, this represents a considerable amount of technology and investment here at Business Objects, and we need to proceed a step at a time. Doing an initial release under the existing Labs license is the easiest and fastest way for us to get the actual software in people's hands, in order to get into real consultation with people about next steps.
The Labs license is designed to be pretty friendly, while doing what is necessary to protect Business Objects around unsupported offerings, but of course this initial release will not yet include sources for the framework itself. We'll see how quickly things can evolve from this point...
As your business is user-friendly reporting tools, I hope that in due course you can open source the CAL compiler and libraries, even if Gem Cutter remains proprietary.
It would be to your benefit to have a larger number of people familiar with CAL, and more wrappers for Java libraries available.
While Business Objects sells more products than "reporting tools", yes, this is actually the motivation for this whole exercise. We realise we have something that is more general than what is derived of specific commercial value (the high-level libraries that define BI 'domain models' for us). Therefore, we are thinking about open source for the pieces that define the functional framework and tools. However, in this phase we want people in various communities to get access, and once they've "seen the animal", help us determine what the best model for future sharing would be. For instance, we don't believe that simply dumping this thing on sourceforge would be a good idea. There are quite a few existing open source foundations, and doubtless many possible avenues we could take. There's much to learn, and Business Objects has not been down this road before. Hence the need to gauge interest and learn where it lies, discuss, find partners we can work with etc. etc.
We're looking forward to this next step, because so far people only have our announcements and a few documents to go on. Even though this next step is not "open sourcing", it will be the first time that people can get firsthand experience of what exists. I don't think we can have any meaningful discussion with folks on details of the future until we have crossed that bridge.
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