I spent Wednesday at the world headquarters of the Sirius corporation. It was great to meet Mark Taylor’s team, and to see another pure open source company thriving.

The Rivermead House is right on the river, with a number of canal boats parked out front. It was one of the many eerily similar things between our two companies (the OpenNMS Group offices look out over two small ponds).

Everyone sits together (which is also similar to our office) and I must adopt their method for cutting down on the amount of profanity used in the workplace. They have mapped a number of common swear words to various IT vendors and products, so it is not uncommon to hear something like “that is a big, steaming pile of [insert vendor name here]”.

Later in the morning Dj Walker-Morgan arrived. Currently the editor-in-chief for “The H” (a technical website with an open source focus) I did not realize that he was also one of the early employees of Micromuse. I am hoping Mark didn’t feel too left out as we reminisced about all of the people we knew back then (and if you happen to read this, Angela, we both thought you were awesome).

The only downside was that I had to cut the day a little short to make my plane to Norway. It was a great day and I look forward to a closer relationship with Sirius and seeing Dj again in the near future.