It was brought to my attention today that Nick Yeates, the new Community Manager at Zenoss, posted a “Lets [sic] Beat the OpenNMS Community” note to the Zenoss forums.
If you’ll remember, a few days ago I posted a notice about the annual LinuxQuestions poll, which included:
If you’re feelin’ the OpenNMS love, please vote. Since OpenNMS appeals to a much smaller, power user class of people than many system and network admins, we rarely win these things, but it is nice to be included in the poll.
Nothing too fancy. Nagios always wins these type of polls anyway (followed closely by MRTG and Cacti) and I wasn’t expecting much, and I even said so in announcing it.
So I found it amusing that a company with US$25 million in venture capital decided to call us out on this particular poll. I mean, if they are feeling threatened by a bunch of guys with no marketing budget, no VC and the backing of a small (yet profitable) company, there is no way they could stand up to an HP or IBM. Ethan Galstad must have them quaking in their shoes, not to mention my buddies over at Zabbix.
It wasn’t the BOSSIE. It wasn’t TechTarget. It was LinuxQuestions.
I wasn’t going to say anything at all, but then the phrase “OpenNMS Community” started to bother me. You are trying to beat my community? Not me personally, or the OGP or the OpenNMS Group, but the OpenNMS community as a whole?
First off, you can’t beat our community. I have never had the privilege of working with a better group of people. These are busy professionals, usually at the top of their field, who care enough to take the time to further our project.
Second, they tend to be too busy to register for polls like this, or care about the results.
Third, while I have serious differences with Zenoss, Inc. calling themselves an open source company, I would never attack the Zenoss community. Time after time I’ve stated that the best software is software that works for you, be it Zenoss, or Nagios, or Solarwinds or Tivoli or, yes, OpenNMS. If using Zenoss gets more people involved in the “open way” then this is a “Good Thing” and I’ll be damned if I’m going to discourage it.
I don’t know what’s happening over in Zenoss-land, but the departures of Mark Hinkle and Matt Ray have obviously left a void.
Tarus,
Thanks for the feedback. We got too enthusiastic and made a mistake that was pointed out to by both communities and we have already fixed the title of the post.
It was meant in the spirit of competition but it was not the right message and definitely was not meant as a personal attack. We 100% agree that we all win with engaged “open” communities and will continue to work towards that goal.
Thanks for the post,
Josh
I think we have all gotten a little too enthusiastic in the past, so thank you for your feedback.
I’m just curious about why OpenNMS? It’s not like we have a chance in this poll. It’s kind of like the Dallas Cowboys trying to get psyched to beat the Carolina Panthers.
(grin)
Cowboys vs. Panthers? I wouldn’t got that far.
Maybe a Green Bay Packers vs. Chicago Bears reference?
🙂