Tuesday, February 07, 2012

olap4j releases version 1.0.1, switches to Apache license


I am pleased to announce the release of olap4j version 1.0.1.

As the version number implies, this is basically a maintenance release. It is backwards compatible with version 1.0.0, meaning that any driver or application written for olap4j 1.0.0 should work with 1.0.1.

There is a year's worth of bug fixes, which should help the stability and performance of the XMLA driver in particular.

But more significant than the code changes is the change in license. Olap4j is now released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ASL). Our goal is to maximize the number of applications that use olap4j, and the number of drivers. ASL is a more permissive license than olap4j's previous license, Eclipse Public License (EPL), so helps drive adoption.

For instance, under ASL, if you create a driver by forking an existing driver, you are not required to publish your modified source code, and you may embed the driver in a non-ASL project or product. We hope that this will increase the number of commercial olap4j drivers. (Of course, we hope you will see the wisdom of contributing back your changes, but you are not obliged to.)

Before you ask. It is quite coincidental that this license change occurred in the same week that Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) also switched to Apache Software License. Although I'm sure that Pentaho's motivations were similar to ours.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed fixes and valuable feedback since olap4j 1.0.0, and in particular to Luc for wrangling the release out of the door.

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