Topic: Too good to be true?
Too good to be true?
What I have seen of DC2.0 so far is really good. Better than good! But I am struggling to understand why it's free?
If I am going to spend some serious development time with it, I need to know that it will still be available in say a years time.
I guess this is a typical open source query. Comments please
If I am going to spend some serious development time with it, I need to know that it will still be available in say a years time.
I guess this is a typical open source query. Comments please
Excellent question and thank you very much for the nice words.
So there are two sides to your question - a generic "why do people do open source?" and "what is Human Inference trying to do with DataCleaner?" ... But first I want to make a reassuring remark:
YES datacleaner will be here in a year, and also in five years and basically we can't even prevent it from being here in a hundred years (but people might have forgotten about it and moved to alien technology by then). This is because the software is out there, it's licensed using an open source license (LGPL) and everyone can copy the source code and keep the project going.
So why is it free? Why are Linux, Firefox and other nice OSS products free? To make it really short, I believe that if you focus more on making a great product and less on how you will make money with it, then eventually you'll find that people are willing to pay you money to do stuff with it that you didn't think of in the first place. That's at least my experience.
Of course as a company Human Inference cannot play poker that way, so we have a more formal approach as well as keeping our doors open. We want to allow everyone access to tooling that help them assess the quality of their data. Our business model is to help anyone that needs additional expertise and more precise tooling. I imagine that we will also have extensions to the tool that integrate with eg. the natural language processing engines in Human Inference's products so that we can offer an interface for doing name standardization, address validation, deduplication and much more through the DataCleaner UI. That of course will come at a price, but on the other hand we will make sure that as a free user of DataCleaner you can keep a "no strings attached" relationship with Human Inference.
And a completely different aspect of the Human Inference engagement into DataCleaner is that they are actually saving money by using the tool. We have an extensive flow for our internal management of names and other language elements that we use DataCleaner to filter, profile and manage. So the investment is just as much about saving development costs and not reinventing the wheel.
So there are two sides to your question - a generic "why do people do open source?" and "what is Human Inference trying to do with DataCleaner?" ... But first I want to make a reassuring remark:
YES datacleaner will be here in a year, and also in five years and basically we can't even prevent it from being here in a hundred years (but people might have forgotten about it and moved to alien technology by then). This is because the software is out there, it's licensed using an open source license (LGPL) and everyone can copy the source code and keep the project going.
So why is it free? Why are Linux, Firefox and other nice OSS products free? To make it really short, I believe that if you focus more on making a great product and less on how you will make money with it, then eventually you'll find that people are willing to pay you money to do stuff with it that you didn't think of in the first place. That's at least my experience.
Of course as a company Human Inference cannot play poker that way, so we have a more formal approach as well as keeping our doors open. We want to allow everyone access to tooling that help them assess the quality of their data. Our business model is to help anyone that needs additional expertise and more precise tooling. I imagine that we will also have extensions to the tool that integrate with eg. the natural language processing engines in Human Inference's products so that we can offer an interface for doing name standardization, address validation, deduplication and much more through the DataCleaner UI. That of course will come at a price, but on the other hand we will make sure that as a free user of DataCleaner you can keep a "no strings attached" relationship with Human Inference.
And a completely different aspect of the Human Inference engagement into DataCleaner is that they are actually saving money by using the tool. We have an extensive flow for our internal management of names and other language elements that we use DataCleaner to filter, profile and manage. So the investment is just as much about saving development costs and not reinventing the wheel.
As CTO of Human Inference, I completely underline the words of Kasper here.
What I would like to know from you or the forum is what you aspects of DataCleaner 2.0 are of value for you, and how? And which particular aspects from the Human Inference products would be of interest for you?
What I would like to know from you or the forum is what you aspects of DataCleaner 2.0 are of value for you, and how? And which particular aspects from the Human Inference products would be of interest for you?
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