Month: March 2010

Upcoming OpenNMS Events

Posted on by tarus

Lots of events going on in OpenNMS-land. I thought I’d list a few here:

  • Early bird registration for the OpenNMS Users Conference to be held in Frankfurt, Germany on May 6th and 7th ends tomorrow. This is the place to be to hear all about OpenNMS, and early registration can save attendees €60.
  • Next week I’ll be at the Computerworld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Drop me a note if you are going and want to meet up.
  • On April 10th, Jeff Gehlbach will be speaking at the Texas Linux Fest 2010 on using OpenNMS in enterprise environments. If you have seen any of his OpenNMS and Asterisk presentations in the past, you know how good they are and won’t want to miss this one.
  • We once again have training scheduled in metropolitan Pittsboro, NC, USA for the week of the 19th of April. These classes are both a lot of fun and the best way to get started with OpenNMS.
  • David Hustace, Craig Gallen and myself will be attending the TeleManagement Forum’s ManagementWorld conference in Nice, France, on 18-20 May. Again, if you use or are interested in OpenNMS and you’ll be at the conference, please let us know. We’d love to meet you.
  • And finally, The OpenNMS Group is a platinum sponsor of the Southeastern Linuxfest to be held in South Carolina the weekend of June 12th. Since this is close expect a lot of the OpenNMS crew to be there, and I’ve submitted a couple of talks but haven’t heard back if they have been accepted.

Of course, I’m able to talk, in depth and at length, about OpenNMS pretty much anywhere and anytime (grin). Hope to meet you in person soon.

Linux Link Tech Show Available for Download

Posted on by tarus

Last night I had a lot of fun chatting with the Linux Link Tech Show guys. It is episode #343 and it is available for download.

I love any forum where I can run my mouth for an hour and a half talking about OpenNMS and open source software, and I can’t wait to meet these guys in person at SELF (where we are a diamond sponsor).

Note that it is subtitled “linux talk. unfiltered” and I do use the occasional profanity. The spirit took me toward the end and I did drop one “f-bomb” so if you are sensitive to such things you should probably avoid this podcast.

The Tail of the Dragon

Posted on by tarus

One of my favorite business books is Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Perhaps it is time to order the follow up book, Inside the Tornado.

Lately, working at OpenNMS has been like holding on to the tail of a dragon. Moore uses the tornado analogy, but I think I understand now what he means. Since last fall we’ve added five people, and each time we add more resources, we end up with more business and more work. It’s crazy. It’s fun.

It’s a little scary.

But what really excites me is that we are finally getting some traction in positioning OpenNMS as a replacement for tools such as OpenView and Tivoli. Our guy in the UK, Dr. Craig Gallen, gave a presentation today in Dubai on the work we’ve done with the TeleManagement Forum to bring open source development and ideals to the world’s largest telecommunication companies and vendors, so it was appropriate that today we also found out that we have been nominated for the TMForum Excellence Awards in the Leadership category.

The award will go to “the member company demonstrating leadership, dedication and commitment to the Forum’s industry collaboration activities, and overall progress in the industry” and while I hope we win, just being nominated is a win for open source.

If any of my three readers will be in Nice at the TMForum conference this May, be sure to let me know.

New Order of the Green Polo Members

Posted on by tarus

OpenNMS has survived and grown mainly through the support of its community. The core of that community is represented by an organization called “The Order of the Green Polo” (OGP) and it is the governing body of the OpenNMS project.

Membership must be earned, and current members are responsible for voting in new members. In fact, there are a number of OpenNMS Group employees who are not members of the OGP – while I tend to hire out of that group it is not something I always do, and membership must be earned regardless of where you work.

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce today two new members of the OGP. They both hail from Germany, and they, along with Alex Finger (already a member) are responsible for the upcoming OpenNMS book.

I am constantly humbled by what our community is able to accomplish. We had been talking about an OpenNMS book for years, but it took three guys in Germany to actually make it a reality (well, at least real enough to pre-order).

Klaus Thielking-Riechert has been involved with OpenNMS since the spring of 2008 and is a regular contributor to the discussion lists. He and his wife are also fine hosts and have great taste in beer.

Ronny Trommer works for our partner in Germany, Nethinks, and while also involved in the book he has done a lot of work on the code as well. He gave us the idea for integrating with JasperReports. Here is a “morning” outage report he created (click for a larger image):

We have now formally integrated it into OpenNMS and it will be included in the next release, along with a large number of “canned” reports.

In an environment where the role of community in open source is being questioned, I am both excited and humbled to see ours doing so well. Come meet us at the OpenNMS Users Conference (early-bird registration ending soon).

The Open Core Functionality Ceiling

Posted on by tarus

Jack Hughes has a great post on The Tech Teapot today. He has been examining the effects of an “open core” licensing model on open source communities, and he hypothesized a “functionality ceiling” in such projects as the feature needs of the pay or commercial version outweigh those of the free or community edition.

Using Ohloh he was able to examine graphs of the code for two well-known open core projects. Both of them show a large plateau, seeming to demonstrate his point.

So I decided to look at the OpenNMS graph. It’s considerably different.

This is pretty cool. You can see a bump when I took over the project in 2002, but due to my limited Java skills it doesn’t grow much until 2004 when Matt Brozowski joined the project. After that the growth is pretty phenomenal. We do have a slight plateau as we are preparing for our next stable release, but nothing like the 18+ month long ones for the other projects, and the size of our code base is much, much larger.

Great idea, Jack.