As I wrote a couple of days ago, we were told about a product in Germany that looked heavily based on OpenNMS, although no acknowledgement was given in the article. Since a number of people involved with OpenNMS are German, we set about investigating, and I’m happy to report that it doesn’t appear that there is any license violation going on here.

Alex Finger, one of the OGP, contacted the company and talked with Ronny Trommer of Nethinks. I received this note from Herr Trommer today:

We sell no licenses. We have created a distribution of Open-Source Tools. One part of them is the MONET-SNM-module which uses OpenNMS. The MONET-Ticket module uses OTRS and the MONET-Reporting module uses JasperServer from JasperForge.

All our changes are completely GPL. We have build a NagVis-adaption to OpenNMS cause some customers want it. Additionaly i have created a JasperServer-Interface to get a better Report-Management with JasperServer. This is fully documented incl. source on http://www.opennms.org/index.php/JasperServer_Integration. The source is complete GPL and everybody can use it. If someone interested on the NagVis-Adapter we will give full source. We have posted it on the mailinglist.

I have instructed our webmaster to clearify the situation with a new product-description like here:

http://www.nethinks.com/sub/produkte/

Our job is to do projects in network management, service desks and reporting for our customers.

All our installations on customers contains the following copyright

Distributed by NETHINKS GmbH – OpenNMS Copyright © 2002-2008 The OpenNMS Group, Inc. OpenNMS® is a registered trademark of The OpenNMS Group, Inc.

The about-page is not changed.

All our customers know, they use OpenNMS in MONET-SNM. They had never paid a buck for a license.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the definition of “open source”, and especially its use and commercialization. It is exactly companies like Nethinks that we want using OpenNMS, and they have done an excellent job of contributing back to the community. While we have completed an OTRS integration directly in to OpenNMS, I plan to work to see that this JasperServer work gets integrated as well (giving Nethinks full credit, of course).

When I wrote the original article I tried to err on the side that Nethinks was indeed abiding by the license, and it is great to not only find out that they are but they have gone a bit beyond the required with their website changes and contributions.

Thanks to Alex and Ronny for getting this straightened out.