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Pentaho Acquires Kettle FAQ
Q. Why does it make sense for Kettle to join the Pentaho project?
A. By joining the projects, it makes both stronger. Kettle provides powerful data integration capabilities, and Pentaho
will add resources to build more functionality into Kettle and integrate it as a component to the platform and with other
Pentaho projects. In addition, the merging of projects addresses customer needs for support, services, direction, etc. by
commercial open source principles and adds more full-time development resources. By having Kettle as a permanent part of
Pentaho, we can provide better support and even product direction than we could for external data integration and Extract,
Transform, and Load (ETL) solutions.
Q. What contributions will Pentaho make to the Kettle project?
A. Pentaho will enhance and integrate Kettle with the other components in the Pentaho BI platform. The first integration of
Kettle with the Pentaho platform is already available in the downloads area in the “latest builds” section.
Q. Why did Pentaho approach the Kettle project, as opposed to other projects, or creating a new open
source data integration project?
A. After evaluating the available open source data integration projects, our conclusion was that Kettle provides very powerful
and scalable data integration capabilities, supports a wide range of commercial and open source databases, with exceptional
ease of use, requiring no coding for even complex transformations.
Q. Will Matt Casters stay with the project?
A. Yes, Matt will continue to be the lead developer on the Kettle project in his new role at Pentaho.
Q. Will it still be possible to have features implemented by offering the developers free beer?
A. Yes, the situation has even improved as you can now also offer American Beer as well as Belgian and other European beers.
Q. What does this mean as far as development resources?
A. In addition to the existing contributors, Pentaho will add developers to enhance more of Kettle’s functionality
and more integration with other Pentaho projects like Mondrian.
Q. What happens to the Kettle JavaForge project site?
A. For now, everything remains the same. Over time, we will move the content to the Pentaho.org site.
Q. Why would someone put a fake pink flamingo on their lawn? Why do you see that so often in the U.S.?
A. The three-dimensional pink lawn flamingo was originally created by a serious sculptor, who was contracted by Union
Products in 1956 to create three-dimensional versions of their popular two-dimensional "Plastics for Lawns."
As far as why people put them on their lawns, the exact date when bad taste was invented is unknown.
Q. Will Pentaho create a commercial version of the Kettle under a different license type??
A. Kettle will continue to be available under a free open source license (LGPL), and most enhancements produced by Pentaho
will be added to the free open source version. In the future, Pentaho will also add capabilities to better support larger
deployments that will be available as part of a commercial license.
Q. Will professional support plans become available?
A. Yes. Starting immediately, customers and partners can subscribe to flexible support plans that meet their needs.
Q. What does this mean for existing Kettle clients?
A. More features, more support, and additional open source BI capabilities that they can use from the Pentaho BI
project. Pentaho’s open source BI capabilities are an excellent complement to Kettle’s data integration
capabilities. In many cases, people who are integrating data from different systems with Kettle are ultimately trying
to put more information in the hands of business users. Pentaho provides reporting, analysis, and dashboards that make
that information more accessible to different business users. Most importantly, they now will have optional professional
support plans available to them, which reduces risk and makes it easier to deploy Kettle for production applications.
Q. Will Pentaho seek contributions from the community?
A. Absolutely, we will continue to seek contributions just like we have in the past.
Q. Will the Kettle name change?
A. Yes, over time Kettle will be renamed to "Pentaho Data Integration."
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