Dear Samsung,
I thought I’d write you another letter. A few months back you’ll recall I wrote you a letter asking about your use of Saiku CE within your organisation. Very nicely, a couple of your developers in Vancouver got on a call with me where we discussed the use of Saiku within Samsung and I got the chance to demonstrate Saiku EE. It was a very enjoyable call and enlightening as well. I had assumed that Saiku was used occasionally as part of a Pentaho BI server or similar, on the call I learnt that Saiku Server 2.5 is actually quite a big part of the report distribution for the team, and judging by the analytics we receive from google, is certainly used by the Kies group and others for report distribution.
Anyway all that aside, after my demo we sadly ran out of time to talk about the bigger picture and I can’t help but feel from the follow up emails the people in charge of the Saiku Server project largely missed the point of our call, which is possibly my fault, who knows, which wasn’t EE upgrade or license sales, but just contributing to the project as a whole. It would be great if Samsung bought an EE license, hell, our most expensive license only costs $35,000 and would be a nice contribution to the platform which you have used for a year or two now, you don’t have to use it, it would just be a nice way to acknowledge its use. But your developers cited a number of issues preventing the upgrade to 3.x and that is fine, I understand and accept that. What I don’t really understand is why when we followed up asking politely if they wanted to sponsor development, fund the project or commit some resource, we were sent a reply suddenly diminishing the role Saiku played and told that we’d hear from you if anything required building but otherwise you were fine. I find it a shame a company that reported $305bn in revenue in 2014, can’t find the time or funds to support an open source project they have used for a good length of time. As ever, I like to bring up Mozilla’s recent commitment to open source with their fund, I think its a great platform and demonstrates the importance open source software plays in businesses in the 21st century.
Of course Samsung, you have an open source group, which I think is great, but I can’t help but feel that the projects you support on there are projects that are included in your end user apps, and not projects that make your life easier and more productive within the business. Don’t get me wrong, I love Samsung brands, I’ve had most of the Galaxy phones, a Galaxy tab and the monitor I’m writing this on is a Samsung flat screen, so I understand why supporting open source software is important to you, but I think you also need to see the bigger picture and realise that it’s not just the end user tools you should be supporting.
So here it is Samsung, you use Saiku, and I know from the call we had, there was some interest on your end regarding Saiku Reporting. We are running a kickstarter to allow us to release Saiku Reporting under the apache license. Or, send some developers our way and start contributing to the platform with resource! We only require £15,000 but we are short with 6 days to go.
Just in case you were worried you might not be able to afford it, I have created a report, in a similar format to what we plan to supply with Saiku Reporting, detailing the revenue you guys generate vs what we are asking:
You can even have a play around with it live, because you aren’t the only ones, Amazon, HP and others all pull the same trick.
So if you have some petty cash stuck down the back of one of your sofa’s, feel free to help support a project you make use of daily within your organisation and help keep Saiku open source.
Thanks
Tom
Magical Trouts Blog 