My life has been rather … complex … lately, so I apologize for not posting. I hope to get caught up over the next week or so. But there have been a few personnel changes at good ol’ OpenNMS that I wanted to announce.

The first one is that DJ Gregor has left our band for a job at a slightly larger company. It seems that he was more of a social animal than he thought, and he missed being around people (DJ was our one remote employee). I also think some of his friends (who I owe for getting me on the LISA game show back in 2005 without my knowledge) might have had something to do with it as well.

It was the nicest parting of ways I’ve ever experienced as an employer, since DJ will still be a major part of the project and he negotiated with his new employer to continue to contribute. He’ll be with us again at Dev-Jam.

Karma taketh away and karma giveth. Last week I found out that Ben Reed was available, and we pretty much closed the deal in a couple of hours. Like DJ, Ben is a founding member of the OGP, has mad open source cred through his work on Fink, and he was working with OpenNMS before I was.

He’ll be yet another one of our jacks of all trades here at the Group, and expect to see his hand in support, releases and improved Fink support for OpenNMS (grin).

He’ll be at WWDC this year as well as aKademy, so if you plan to attend either one of those events be sure to look for him. He’s RangerRick on the IRC channel.