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10 June 2008, 15:41

Pentaho switches to GPL 2.0 for Business Intelligence Suite

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Starting with the upcoming version 2.0, US code vendor Pentaho will be marketing the Pentaho BI Platform under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. The platform is the centrepiece of Pentaho's open source business intelligence suite. It includes the Pentaho BI Server and the Pentaho Design Studio development environment. Until now, the software, originally released at the end of 2005, had been sold under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Licenses for other components in the suite, such as Pentaho Analysis (Mondrian, Common Public License, CPL), Pentaho Data Integration (formerly Kettle, LGPL), Pentaho Reporting (formerly JFreeReport, LGPL) and Pentaho Data Mining (Weka, already sold under GPL) have not changed.

The firm says it has switched to GPL because that license has become by far the most widely used open source license. In addition, the principle of commonality also reportedly plays a role. Changes to the GPL code also have to be licensed in the same way so that the software remains free.

Pentaho says it chose version 2 of the GPL instead of the more recent GPLv3 because version 2 is more compatible with licenses of partner companies and other open source projects. A FLOSS exception will also allow the BI platform to be distributed with software under other open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) even if they are not compatible with GPLv2.

Version 2.0 of Pentaho's business intelligence suite is expected to be released in the second half of 2008. JasperSoft, a competitor on the market for open source BI, also sells its software under the GPL.

(trk)

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