Dev-Jam 2008 is officially underway. Monday morning I gave my “State of OpenNMS” speech, and then turned it over to Matt.

Since last year’s conference we’ve had ten releases of OpenNMS. This was mainly due to Ben’s repackaging of the application into the distro-specific bits (that rarely change) and the main Java code. Ben is an amazing packager (he is an admin with the fink project) and this took our release cycle from two days to about two hours. The best part is that anyone can build their own packages, since OpenNMS doesn’t require commercial packaging tools like Bitrock.

Speaking of releases, next week we hope to release 1.5.94 which will be the release candidate for 1.6.0. If all goes well, we should have a new stable by the end of August. We are then hoping to start work on 1.8 which will focus on capsd and notifications. The goal is a six month, focused release cycle.

We also took care of some overdue business by awarding two people their green polo shirts. Alejandro Galue joins us from Venezuela, and he has worked quite a bit on our thresholding system. Craig Gallen hails from the UK (although he is Irish) and has been instrumental in our work with NGOSS. He has also attended all four Dev-Jams. While they both were inducted into the OGP last year, I wasn’t able to get their polos made until now (I have to do some special stuff with Lands End to get the proper color green).

I then spent a lot of time chatting about the future direction of the application, as well as updating the team on some of the more private aspects of the project. While The OpenNMS Group provides financial support for OpenNMS, it is the OGP that is responsible for its governance, and even though we are open source that doesn’t mean we do everything publicly (grin). There are some amazing things on tap for the next year.

I then turned it over to Matt and we started setting up the projects to work on during the week. We’re using a format similar to barcamp, and we’re tracking it on the wiki. I’m focusing on writing the new OpenNMS book, which is also available on the wiki.

It looks like it is going to be a great week.