I am writing this about 30 feet from the ocean in Laie, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. This makes the 43rd state in the US I’ve been able to visit.

We now have a client here, and some people are bound to say “lucky you, you get to go to Hawaii”. I travel a lot for OpenNMS, and I guess I deserve to get a cool trip once in awhile.

But you know what’s funny? They are all cool trips. I was going to write something like “yeah, I get to go to Hawaii but I also had to go to Saltillo, Mexico”. But then, outside of the heat, I really liked Saltillo. On Fridays you get to go to this one taco stand for cachete de puerco and I’ve been craving it ever since.

The community around OpenNMS is special. I think that becoming a user and then deciding to purchase services and/or support acts as sort of a filter. I have friends at other companies who complain about their customers, and I think in part it’s because those companies might oversell their products and thus they end up with unhappy clients. I don’t think we have any customers we don’t like.

We don’t have any full time sales people: our users sell our products for us. Thus when I go on a client site visit I tend to meet up with people who are a lot like me. No, I don’t mean fat and loud, but they see the value of open source and they are eager to experience the benefits of using it. And while we may see things differently politically or religiously the open source connection means that I always have fun on these trips.

But I have to admit Hawaii is still pretty freakin’ cool.