Author: tarus

MonitoringForge, RIP

Posted on by tarus

The following post contains language that some may find offensive. If that describes you, please skip it. I don’t aim to be crude for the sake of being crude, but sometimes certain words can’t be replaced.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

At times, I am an asshole. I know this. Being human and full of faults I sometimes let my emotions get the better of me. But sometimes I believe I am unfairly portrayed as an asshole. It’s just that my bullshit meter pegs a little quicker than most.

Back in 2006, the Open Management Consortium was announced to a lot of fanfare. We were asked to join at the 11th hour, but something didn’t seem quite right to me. While the idea was strong, in order to get a bunch of separate and often competing companies to play nice together involves a lot more than a mission statement. It requires a tremendous amount of work and time.

Needless to say, the Consortium didn’t get much traction outside of a lot of press, and even a reboot in 2008 didn’t help. The domain name is now parked (and possibly up for sale it seems).

Jump forward to 2009 and the formation of MonitoringForge. A similar organization as the Consortium, I was just as wary about it and I said so. This got me labeled as an asshole, as in “why can’t you just be nice for once and stop being so negative.” It’s just that it seemed to be to be nothing more than a marketing ploy, and I felt the need to tell people about it.

As I was looking for my Sourceforge password today (I had to change it earlier this year due to a security issue and couldn’t remember what I had changed it to), I came across an exchange I’d had with Ross Turk about MonitoringForge and decided to see whatever happened to it. The website just says “The Monitoringforge Service was stopped as of June 30.” and lists a contact e-mail.

Now I’m not sure if it was this June 30th or last year’s June 30th (their twitter feed stopped in May of last year), but I think it is funny that the site was launched with such hoopla but died with nary a whimper.

The natural asshole part of me brings this up with a touch of schadenfreude. But the reason I’m writing about it has a direct bearing on open source and running an open source business.

When you are just starting out, the temptation is to do anything, simply anything, to get noticed. If you are a VC-backed company, marketing and perceived value is more than half of the business plan. But in the long run, your customers and your potential customers will put more value into your words and actions than your press releases.

I work hard not to involve OpenNMS or lend my name to any endeavor in which I am not 100% confident. It’s hard enough to get a large company to trust in a small company without having a string of failures to cast doubt. When I tell our clients that I plan for OpenNMS to be around in 10, 20, or even 50 years I mean it, and while they may not fully believe it, at least I haven’t given them any reason to worry by trading that trust for some short-lived notoriety.

Another thing I do that earns me the “asshole” or “zealot” title is rail against the improper use of the term “open source” when it comes to business models. Matt Aslett wrote recently about a number of companies dropping the term “open source” from their marketing, and he listed several of them. He wrote “The list below represents a small and unscientific sample, but these are among the highest profile open source-related vendors” which included companies like Zenoss and Groundwork.

We didn’t make the cut. Perhaps if we had joined in the Open Management Consortium (like Zenoss) or MonitoringForge (like Groundwork, who built it) we would have been “high profile” enough to make his list. But since the article was basically about a retreat from open source I can see at least one reason why we were omitted. It could also be why Zenoss is facing a user revolt and possible fork and we, thank goodness, are not.

I present this as a cautionary tale. In business, focus above all else on your customers. Be completely truthful and never get involved in anything you do not believe in 100%. Remember the sage Tony Montana who said “All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don’t break them for no one.”

New OpenNMS Book – in English!

Posted on by tarus

As we start work on the English language OpenNMS book, which is turning into a rather large undertaking, imagine my surprise when I found out that one has already been written.

Yes! Amazingly, you can get an OpenNMS book for about US$0.50 a page containing content scraped from Wikipedia. While I’m not about to drop US$63 to see this for myself, I just wanted to warn everyone that the publishers of this “book” have absolutely no relationship with the OpenNMS Project and I, in no way, have endorsed it.

Betascript is a an imprint of VDM Publishing which is known for repackaging content from Wikipedia, and the latter reports that a Swiss newspaper “described VDM’s practices as controversial and bordering on deception”. This book will consist of the Wikipedia pages for OpenNMS, Network Monitoring, Network Management and FCAPS. Save yourself the money and just click and print them yourself.

At the moment, the only “real” OpenNMS book is in German. This English language book should be avoided. I am working with Amazon to see what our options are for getting it removed.

Anything You Want

Posted on by tarus

My three readers know that I’m a fan of new and alternative ways of doing business, and of people and companies who change the status quo.

One person I follow is Derek Sivers, who founded the company CD Baby. By leveraging emerging technologies he helped change the way music is sold. Back in February of 2010 I blogged about both my experience with CD Baby and about a TED presentation Derek did that really reflected my experience with open source communities.

Well, he has a new book out called Anything You Want. I ordered mine this morning (I was one of the 100 people who got an autographed version). From the Amazon review:

Derek is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Just as important, perhaps more so–he is a phenomenal teacher. Whether detailing the fascinating rise of CDBaby, explaining catastrophic (but common) founder mistakes, or teaching me about relational databases in two minutes using analogies, he makes the complex simple. Moreover, he makes it all actionable.

If you want a true manifesto, a guidebook with clear signposts, and a fun ride you’ll return to again and again, you have it here in this book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did

I rarely recommend a book sight unseen, but my guess is Derek will not disappoint.

Neat Trick: Holiday Notifications

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I got an interesting question from a support customer today. Due to the Fourth of July holiday this weekend, they wanted to send all notifications to the On Call destination path, but starting on Tuesday morning at midnight they wanted them to go back to normal.

I thought of an easy way to do this. Copy the notifications.xml file to notifications.normal.xml and to notifications.oncall.xml. Edit the latter file and change all of the <destinationPath> tags to point to the On Call path.

Since changes to the notifications.xml file do not require a restart, all they have to do is to set up a cron to copy the “oncall” version of the file to notifications.xml when the holiday starts, and another cron entry to copy the “normal” version back when the holiday ends.

Easy peasy.

Save the Date: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe 2012

Posted on by tarus

The next OpenNMS Users Conference in Europe will be held 10-11 May, 2012 back in lovely Fulda, Germany.

Building on the last three years of this conference, we’ll be changing the format yet again.

The first day will be a traditional conference. We will have a call for papers and set up several tracks for people to get the most out of their OpenNMS experience.

The second day will be a barcamp, an “un-conference” similar to what we did this year. The attendees will determine what they want to see.

In between will have another social outing involving fine German beer.

For those who are interested, just before the conference we will offer two days of intense training on OpenNMS. On 8 May we will have a repeat of the training I did on the first day this year – covering all of the basics of OpenNMS, and on 9 May we will have an advanced training day, building on that. So if you came to the conference this year, you can choose to show up a day early and build on what you learned, and if you didn’t make it this year you can attended both days if you like.

Hope to see you there.

Changing Business Models

Posted on by tarus

Matt Aslett has a new post today in which he pointed out that “a significant number of high profile open source-related vendors had stopped using the term open source as an identifying differentiator.”

As I read through his list of 14 companies, it seemed to me the reason that some of them are finally refraining from using open source as a differentiator is that they were never open source companies in the first place. Despite their best efforts to rebrand the term, they failed. Two of them, Groundwork and KnowledgeTree, haven’t had a “community edition” since 2009, so I think we can stop referring to them in any discussion of open source software, except perhaps as an example of what not to do. Red Hat is on the list, but they are still proudly open source and they are also still profitable.

When you get right down to it, profits are a major measure of the success of a company. When I find myself surrounded by VC-types, their measure of profit is often in how much money they made when selling a particular company. If that company does well or poorly after that is no matter to them. That doesn’t make them evil, but it also doesn’t mean they make great businesses.

More often than not, VCs have to make a decision about when to stop funding a company. Many of the companies in Matt’s list have been around for five years or more, and this tends to be the event horizon for VCs to cash out or quit, so I can fully understand why they are trying to rebrand themselves in search of a business plan that works. If they don’t, they die.

The survival of my company, on the other hand, is totally up to us. We adopted a business model that resulted in profits from Day One, and we work hard to keep it that way. Although this doesn’t gain us any respect in the Valley, it doesn’t matter all that much since we don’t need it. And that is kind of the point – the traditional VC model is dying as quickly as the open core model is dying.

Just to be clear, I am thinking of VC-backed software companies. With the rise in true open source solutions and the big growth areas in software coming in the form of inexpensive apps (think Angry Birds) and “freemium” applications (think Farmville), VCs are becoming unnecessary. I still think the VC model can work in areas such as biotechnology where huge startup costs are the norm.

The thing that really excites me these days is seeing how traditional business models are being disrupted. Open source is definitely changing the software industry, and the technologies open source enables are changing things on even a larger scale. I love reading about food trucks that tell customers where they are through Twitter. And I love what Kevin Smith is doing to the movie industry.

The entertainment industry is undergoing huge changes. First, digital distribution means that the cost to deliver content has gone way down. Second, decent home theatre systems are within the reach of many, which means a trip to the local multiplex, with its high costs, talking patrons and sticky floors, is becoming unnecessary. And much like VCs, the movie studios are trying to find a role for themselves in a world that doesn’t need them.

Today, Kevin posted a long rant about his new movie “Red State” (warning – profanity). In it, he has a novel idea for getting people into movie theatres. Instead of just showing a movie, he couples it with a personal appearance after the show for Q&A. Not only are people willing to pay for this, they are willing to pay a premium.

Of course, even a novice VC would look at this and say “it doesn’t scale”. Kevin addresses this in part by proposing using network technology to provide live Q&A over the network or via satellite. Using Twitter, Facebook, SMS, etc. people could still ask questions and interact with the artist.

This new “self distribution” plan has one amazing upside: it’s profitable. By using social media to market, he doesn’t need to spend millions on advertising. By running his art as a business, he’s already in the black – the rest is just gravy. Will “Red State” make as much as “Avatar”? Probably not, but it will net more than “Gulliver’s Travels” did, at least domestically.

And the best part is that most of that money will end up in the pockets of the people who created the content.

The movie studios that survive, like Lionsgate, will adapt and embrace these new models. Those that don’t will be looking for another business plan. Perhaps we’ll see on the cover of Variety a story reading “major studios stop using the term ‘movie production’ as an identifying differentiator.”

2011 Dev-Jam: Day Five

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Well, it is hard to believe that another Dev-Jam has come to a close.

I’m not lying when I say this is one of my favorite weeks of the year, and this one didn’t disappoint. A lot of code got written and OpenNMS 1.10 is much closer to becoming a reality.

Also, we inducted two new people into the Order of the Green Polo (OGP).

The OGP is the governing body of the OpenNMS Project, and new people must be voted in by the existing membership. This year Donald Desloge was inducted based, in part, on his work with the JasperReports integration, and Seth Leger joined the group on the strength of his IPv6 work.

Seth was involved in the OpenNMS project back before I was when he worked at Oculan, so it is nice to see someone with his background still working on it after ten years.

We’re already talking about next year.

2011 Dev-Jam: Day Four

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Today started out with a Marshmallow Challenge exercise organized by Alex Finger.

He saw this originally presented as a TED talk. The idea is that you divide into teams, and each team is given 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and a single jumbo marshmallow. Each team has 18 minutes to elevate their marshmallow as high as possible by building a free standing structure using just those materials.

It was fun, although my team was robbed as Alex ignored the fact that Seth and Antonio’s structure fell over after time had expired and they had to set it back up, but I guess this is to be expected since Alex can be considered a French judge.

Sometimes life is not fair.

Anyway, the rest of the day was pretty cool. With so many people here from Europe we discussed opening a European office of the OpenNMS Group, and I think this is pretty close to happening. From the frequency of commits, lots of code is getting written, and folks seem to be having a great time.

Any Dev-Jam post wouldn’t be complete without talking about dinner. Chris Rodman at Papa John’s Pizza FedEx’d us some coupons for free pizza and wings, which went well with the evening’s Jason Straham film festival (Transporter and Transporter 2 ).

2011 Dev-Jam: Day Three

Posted on by tarus

While very unstructured, we do try for some organization at Dev-Jam and it starts (and pretty much ends) with a morning standing scrum.

We had to switch to a standing scrum after the first day since people were so excited to be working together again, scrum was taking forever to complete. By making everyone stand, it helped shorten things considerably.

I spent the day updating the OpenNMS Wikipedia page. This was my first foray into editing Wikipedia, and while none of my edits have caused problems, we did end up having the page for The OpenNMS Group deleted rather quickly. Wikipedia has a policy of not including anything but notable companies (for which we don’t qualify) but I wanted to have a page there, not to promote The OpenNMS Group, but to better separate the .com side of the project from the .org. Oh well, I understand their reasoning, so all we need is about 30-40 independent articles on the OpenNMS Group to try again. (grin)

Toward the end of the day the room filled with the wonderful smell of smoked BBQ, courtesy of Mike Huot.

Once again we had an amazing meal, and I really appreciate the work he put into it.

OpenNMS Adopts GPLv3+

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If you have been following the OpenNMS git repository, you saw a huge commit by Ben today. He changed all of the copyright headers in OpenNMS to declare that the project is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, or any later version of the license (starting with OpenNMS version 1.10).

This is pretty much a non-event, as the prior license, GPLv2 or any later version, implied GPLv3 since the project uses a number Apache licensed components and that license is not compatible with GPLv2.

We just wanted to expressly state that the code is licensed under version 3, so don’t get too nervous on your next “git pull” when every file changes.