Hey Pentaho Community! How are you doing?

Doug Moran, Pentaho community guy, started a very interesting thread that got me to think a bit and give an unusually long reply. So long that I decided to copy it as a new blog post and get my weekly task done!


Apparently people is always asking him

How's the community going?

followed by the inevitable

I just saw a post that says Jasper has 150,000 community members, how big is Pentaho's community?

Here's my take on this:

Comparing downloads is absolutely meaningless. Specially on BI, everyone should know that numbers are only comparable when they have things in common. You mentioned Jasper compared to Pentaho cause surely it's the biggest comparison people ask you to do. But can you really compare the 2 of them? Take a look at the forum numbers:


Platform threads:
Jasper: 4k;
Pentaho: 4k

Reporting threads:
Jasper: 18k (jasperreports) + 12k (ireports);
Pentaho: 8k

Analysis threads:
Jasper: 300;
Pentaho: 5k (forums) + 1k (mailing list)

ETL threads:
Jasper: 250;
Pentaho: 10k

Dashboard threads:
Jasper: - ;
Pentaho: 1k

Other threads:
Jasper: - ;
Pentaho: A lot


Anyone looking at this numbers can immediately tell that we have, on one side, a BI Tool and on the other a Reporting tool. Why compare different things?


Going back the the main question, I have a suggestion. Next time someone asks you "how's the community doing?", instead of answering, why don't you:

• Invite them to go to Portugal in September to the community meeting. A pentaho meeting usually sponsored by the community itself and with people all over the world? Assuming, of course, they missed the one in Barcelona 2009 or in Mainz 2008.
• Send them the links to some project made by the community, I currently can think of...
  • CDF
  • PAT
  • Xmla4Js
  • CDA
  • CBF
  • CDE
  • GeoBI
• Ask them to join the ##pentaho irc channel on freenode that usually has around 50 simultaneous users
• Tell them to read a bit... Suggest authors like Jos Van Dongen, Roland Bouman or Maria Roldan
• Visit other countries
• Or if they have a computer, why not read some blogs?
  • to get their eyes on pentaho,
  • musing about what the community is doing
  • from gurus, geeks, consultants or hackers to
  • many others that will guarantee a good reading.
  • So just let them think about it and draw their conclusions

I'd say the community is doing very well, thank you, and tell them we send our best regards.