I forget when I was first introduced to open source. Back when I got my first computer in 1978, most of the software I used I either wrote myself or I copied from program listings found in books or magazines. Along came modems and the ability to download software, but even then a lot of the software I was exposed to was “shareware” and not true open source. I could, say, download a role-playing game off of a BBS, but if I wanted more than the first few levels I had to send the author some money and they would ship back a floppy disk.

It was sometime in the mid to late 1990s that I got exposed to open source proper. I mainly worked with workstations running Solaris, and there was a website called sunfreeware.com that hosted a lot of what we would now call open source packages. I also used Red Hat’s Linux distribution but more as an experiment than in production.

But on September 10th, 2001, I started working in open source full time when I joined a company called Oculan to build a business around their open source network monitoring project, OpenNMS.

I’m not going to try to rehash 25 years in one post, but since I founded this blog about 18 months later in 2003 you can pretty much read my journey if you are so inclined. Today I mainly just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how important open source has been to me and my professional life.

I’ve always loved technology, and when I started working with enterprise software it was kind of cool. I was a sales engineer, so I would work with an account manager to develop solutions for customers. Unfortunately, sometimes I would be brought in after the technology decision had already been made, and there were a few times where it became painfully obvious that the solution the customer bought wasn’t the best one for the job. Some of these licenses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it made me feel a little dirty when I realized they were sold without the customers’ best interests at heart.

Working in open source changed that for me. Since you don’t sell licenses, it moves the choice back into the hands of the customer. The customer pays for services, and if those services are no longer valuable they can stop paying without losing access to the software.

I was at Oculan until May of 2002, when their leadership decided not to publish their software under an open source license moving forward. I was able to take over the OpenNMS project (with their blessing) and built it to the point that, in September of 2004, Matt Brozowski, David Hustace and myself founded The OpenNMS Group. We sold that company in 2019 and I left in 2021.

In 2022 I started at Amazon Web Services and managed to stay there for exactly four years. While I was in an open source strategy group (that rolled up under the VP of Marketing), I felt kind of divorced from the open source communities I had lived in for two decades. It was nice to get back to my roots when I joined Percona two months ago.

Percona is the kind of company I wanted OpenNMS to become, and my hope is that I can work for them for several more years before I retire.

I am writing this from Amsterdam where I am attending Percona Live, and it is fun to be surrounded by people determined to make open source databases the obvious choice for all applications. Not only are the people here my coworkers and customers, many are my friends.

The one thing I’m most grateful for over two and a half decades of open source are the amazing people I’ve met and worked with during that time. My life has been made richer for it, and I look forward to making even more friends in the near future.