One of the things I love about this project is that it is global. We’re located in North Carolina, and I live in a small town, so I am amazed that we have had contributions to OpenNMS from all over the world. The commercial side of OpenNMS has customers in 10 countries, and the project has been invited to participate in the .org Pavilion at LinuxWorld Korea in Seoul this June (still looking for Korean-speaking OpenNMS users to help out in the booth [grin]).

Next month I’m in the UK for a week and I’ve decided to visit Europe the following week to meet up with some of the people who are doing great things with OpenNMS. One of those is Antonio Russo in Naples. He is the main contributor to the Italian-Adventures branch in CVS that includes inventory, Cisco configuration management, topology and map (yes, map) improvements.

Unlike some “open source” projects, OpenNMS doesn’t have a “free” and a “commercial” version. All of our work, with the possible exception of some developer’s pet project, is done publicly on Sourceforge’s CVS.

When Antonio approached us over a year ago with some ideas about improving the map functionality, we gave him a branch. The current branch “italian-adventures2” is based off of 1.2.5, and should be updated soon to 1.2.7. He and his team are using it in production, and we hope to have it into HEAD in a couple of weeks.

I have been playing with it for the last couple of days, and Antonio is helping me overcome some issues, but from what I can see it is pretty impressive.

If you want to play with the maps (and I know you do) you will have to:

a) use IE on Windows
b) get a copy of the SVG ver. 6 beta from Adobe.

I have tried this on Firefox Linux and OSX and I can state for certain that it doesn’t work.

There appears to be a lot more in this than just maps, and I can’t wait to show up in Naples (outside the fact that I plan to fall in love with Italy) and see how they are using it. I promise to write up full documentation when I get back. For now there is a README-IA file in the source tree.

Hats off to Antonio, Maurizio and the rest of the people working on Italian Adventures. It’s bound to make OpenNMS 2.0 even more special.