Business intelligence and data warehousing are in the path of open source development. Over the years, open source moved from basic developer tools to infrastructure to application tools and is now moving into applications.
Open source has been around for a long time – the official incarnation started with the creation of the GNU Public License (GPL) in 1985. The layers of open source that underlie what is needed for business intelligence (BI) have matured to the point that they are starting to take on the major players in our market.
http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/6420