Not much posting since I got back from Oz because I’m still busy trying to catch up, but while I was on a sales call today I realized that it was seven years ago, on a Monday, that I first started working with OpenNMS.

Of course this day in history is pretty much overshadowed by the events of September 11th, 2001 (we, along with the rest of the country, didn’t get much work done that day) but it pretty much changed my professional life forever. I can’t imagine what I would be doing now if it wasn’t for OpenNMS, and I think I’m a better man because of it.

Thanks for seven years, and here’s to many more.

I came across this blog entry today entitled “F*** the VCs” (while not profane it does contain the “F-word” so don’t click through if you are thus offended). It’s well written, as are most of the comments.

We’ve thought about VC funding at OpenNMS, but I’m not sure it would work for us. Being profitable, we don’t need the money to survive. It’s also not a market share thing – our target market has changed at least five times since we started this and will probably change again as OpenNMS grows and we adapt.

VC money comes in handy when you have something that easily scales, that needs a lot of start up cash and represents something entirely new. If I ran a VC fund I’d be investing in biotech and not open source software.

An open source business plan based on services can scale, just not along the lines of the “write once, sell one million times” of commercial software. It also doesn’t require a lot of start up cash – a laptop, a mobile phone and an Internet connection got me going. And network management is not new – we’re doing things better and more efficiently, but it is not groundbreaking. As John Casasanta shows in his example conversation with a VC, it’s not a question of having a ton of decent programmers but more a core of dedicated and talented individuals.

As I often say, you can’t stick nine pregnant women in a room and get a baby in a month.

Anyway, it was an interesting article so I thought I’d share.

Yesterday morning before I went of to work I received an e-mail from Dave McLoughlin, the manager of the OpenLogic Expert Community. It was a pretty standard form letter along the lines of:

Dear $FIRST_NAME:

The reason I’m contacting you is because I’m looking for help supporting $PROJECT; we have a customer who is using $PROJECT and would like us to provide support.

Since this was sent to my Sourceforge account address, I figured that OpenLogic had spammed the admins of a number of projects, and sure enough, all of the OpenNMS admins got the same e-mail.

Now this didn’t bother me all that much. I get spam all the time and this was just another example of same. The tone of the e-mail was similar to any other sales pitch I’m likely to see, and the fact that he had done zero homework (it isn’t hard to find out that we already have a commercial venture supporting OpenNMS) pretty much indicated that they had harvested names, projects and e-mail addresses from Sourceforge without context. I just added it to the pile of e-mail from recruiters that start off with “I see you know computers. I have clients who need people who know computers” and the relatives of dead rich people who need me to hold on to some money for a bit.

However it really pissed off two of our team, and one even wrote to Sourceforge asking that OpenLogic get dumped from that site for violating the terms of use:

section 4(b) and 4(c):

Prohibited activity includes, but is not limited to:

…

(b) transmitting chain letters or junk mail to other users;

(c) using any information obtained from the web site in order to contact, advertise to, solicit, or sell to any user without such user’s prior explicit consent;

As I was thinking about this I wondered if this would be considered an example of “open source oversensitivity”. Outsiders might think we are a touchy bunch, but I don’t think, on the whole, we are.

Everyone has buttons, and in this case I think the tone of the letter was pretty condescending, which might have pushed a few. Some people think that open source software can’t be as good as commercial software, and when you here phrases like “take that payment in cash or merchandise,” “$25 gift certificate … just for signing up,” and “receive an iPod” it comes across more like Bob Barker than Bob Young.

My own buttons get pushed occasionally (okay, more than occasionally) but I don’t think this is inherent to open source. Recently Berkay Mollamustafaoglu found out the hard way when trying to introduce an open source project to the Netcool Users list. It appears he was within the acceptable use policy but got booted anyway.

Which reminds me, does anyone remember the Perl-based open source webUI to Netcool? I think it was called “gnomnibus” but I can’t find it on Google. It was shut down by the author’s employer when Micromuse complained.

On the whole, I think the communities around closed source tools are even touchier than the open source ones. At least with open source, community building is a stated goal, and thus dealing with issues of structure and etiquette are common. Closed source communities are more cliquish. On the OpenView Users list I was called a “communist” and accused of putting people out of work with OpenNMS. To some change sucks, while others embrace it.

So, was OpenLogic out of line? Did anyone else who admins on Sourceforge get the same letter? Enquiring minds want to know.

Today Bill Gates officially retires from Microsoft. As much as we might like to hate his policies, without him I doubt our industry would be what it is today. He took the power out of the hands of IBM and put it into the hands of everyday consumers. He amassed a great fortune, and it looks like he’ll be using the rest of his life to spend it, mainly on charitable causes. By doing so he has created an example for others, like Warren Buffett. I wish him well.

The first piece of computer software I ever bought was published by Microsoft. It was the “Colossal Cave Adventure” for the TRS-80.

A picture of me yoinked from my high school yearbook

The TRS-80 was my first computer. I got it for Christmas 1978 when I was 12 years old. It had 4K of RAM and a black and white screen. By April of 1979 I had upgraded it to 48K of RAM (the other 16K of addressable memory was in ROM) and added two 80K floppy drives. That system ran “TRS-DOS” which shared a lot of similarities for what would become MS-DOS.

Now, back then most software was “open” in some sense. Most programs for the TRS-80 were written in BASIC, which is an interpreted language so it was not possible to hide the code. We didn’t have the Internet back then, so my main contact with others was through magazines, such as Creative Computing and Kilobaud. They would often publish program listings that I would stay up late typing in and modifying. Of course I’d make mistakes, but that would help me learn to troubleshoot code.

My Dad was working for General Electric at the time, and I sometimes got to play on their PDP 8. It ran FORTRAN, but it was similar enough to BASIC that it was easy to pick up. In 1982 he bought one of the first IBM PCs: CGA monitor, dual floppies, 256K soldered to the motherboard.

Also in 1982 I went off to high school. They had a VAX, and so I was introduced to the concept of multiuser systems. We had e-mail and shared space were we could put up documents – sort of a precursor to the web.

In 1984 I went off to California to attend Harvey Mudd College, one of the many colleges I eventually was asked to leave (I’ve been kicked out of some of the finest schools in the country). There I met my first VAX running UNIX (Berkeley I believe) and experienced the Internet for the first time (as well as wasting hours playing rogue).

When I eventually returned to North Carolina in 1986 I didn’t have a computer, but a friend had bought one of those fancy “Macintosh” computers. It was pretty cool, but I couldn’t afford one so I used a PC. Several friends of mine from Mudd had gone off to work for this company called Microsoft outside of Seattle. They would send me software, including a Paint program launched on a system called Windows (version 1.0). It really didn’t compare to, say, MacPaint on the Mac, but little did I know how it would catch on. I also got Windows version 2 and eventually 3.0. I could run an app called Procomm that would let me use a modem to communicate with other systems.

Using a modem you could dial in to bulletin board systems (BBSes) and post messages, send mail and download files. I tended toward those systems running WWIV, and in just day or two I could get a message to a friend of mine across the country through Fidonet and other grassroots networks.

Some BBSes were multiuser, but that required multiple, expensive phone lines. So flame wars were funny: you’d have to post, log off, wait awhile until the other guy could log in and post, then repeat the process.

I can remember when 2400 baud modems came out because it was the first time the text would download faster than I could read it. True Internet access was only available on campus, but I eventually found a way to dial in to the campus network (I had friend in IT) so I could use it from my apartment.

Ah, those were the days. Anyway, what are your first memories of Microsoft and what was your first computer?

Okay, so I don’t always rush out to try the latest and greatest meme to sweep the intarwebs. I’m slow.

Apparently, not as slow as Twitter.

Gah.

I’m an old guy. I don’t twit. I still think e-mail is pretty “keen”.

But I decided to try it. I set up my account and downloaded Twitterific. Several guys in the office had accounts so I started to follow them. This is what I got for my trouble:

This sounds like a job for OpenNMS. Hey – Twitter dudes – drop me a “tweet” @Sortova and we’ll see if we can help with things like this:

since you can see I haven’t done 70 tweets in my life, much less an hour. I”m not Coté. (grin)

But hey, if you like this sort of thing, feel free to follow “OpenNMS“.

If you can.

The telecom management market is both huge and dominated by a small group of companies. One of our friends at QinetiQ said that the OSS software market was US$70 billion a year, and 60% of that spending was focused on 30 companies.

Wow.

It’s been an interesting conference, but I have been really unimpressed with the sessions I’ve attended. I’m a geek and very interested in the content, but the speakers have had the most dry and monotone manner of delivery (at least the ones I saw).

While I was dozing in the comfy chair provided for one of these talks, I came up with a vision of this market. I saw it as two enormous sumo wrestlers. One represented the “service provider” companies, and the other represented the “solutions provider” companies. The ring literally became the planet, as many of these companies can comfortably reach across it. I saw them moving slowly around each other, constantly trying to find a better position and to implement a better strategy, and often they would clash together.

Incumbent solutions providers can be almost as big as their customers. The customers would like solutions that are easy to deploy, adapt quickly to changing technology, and interact at a high level. The solutions providers may make a lot of speeches about interactivity, but they thrive on vendor lock-in, as the amounts involved are staggering, and once a client has adopted a solution it is very hard for them to change. This makes them (the solutions providers) very reluctant to implement interfaces that would make it easier for their clients to move to another vendor’s solution.

I think that open source software can play a huge role here. Open source communities tend to be able to react to changing needs more quickly than monolithic commercial companies, and only by having open solutions incorporating the proposed standards will the solutions providers finally step up to support them as well.

But there is a long way to go before that even starts to happen.

David and I are wearing slacks and OpenNMS polo shirts, and we feel underdressed. I would say that 95% of the male attendees are wearing suits and ties. The politics of this event rival the UN, and even the presentations of a technical nature often include a “marketing plan” to get people to adopt the proposed standards. One talk brought up cooperation between the TMF and the DMTF in a fashion that suggested détente.

So it’s been an eye-opening experience if not necessarily a fun one, although I have had some fun and met some great people.

Tomorrow I hope to spend a little time actually wandering around Nice before the flight to Paris.