Commentary

Europe 2008: European Environmentalism

Posted on by tarus

Antonio pointed out to me that there is very little “unsettled” land in Europe. He once flew over Montana, and he remarked how uninhabited it was. In contrast, even flying over remote mountainous sections of Italy you will see buildings and lights.

That is one reason that it seems Europeans are more focused on the environment, or at least conservation.

Automobiles, one of the great carbon consumers on the planet, are much smaller here. Many run diesel engines which are more efficient than gasoline (although some might say that they pollute more but the diesel in Europe has considerably less sulfur than the diesel in the US). There tends to be more public transportation, although I heard one person on the radio in the UK complaining about increased restrictions on cars and he pointed out that a bus running with few passengers could pollute more than if those passengers took separate cars, but at least the option exists.

Fuel prices for cars in Europe haven’t changed much since I was last here, perhaps a 10% rise versus our 50% rise, but that is due in part to the weak dollar. In any case, it is still twice as expensive to buy fuel here than at home.

But I saw two things in Milan that were both quite clever, rather inexpensive and could produce some serious savings.

The first involved escalators in the Metro. We got off the train and were heading up when I noticed that the escalator was not moving. I went to take the stairs and Antonio said “don’t worry” and kept going. The escalator started up as he got close.

How cool is that? Considering the number of airports/train stations/shopping malls/etc. that I’ve been in where the escalators just kept going and going with no one on them I can guess that the energy savings over time would be huge.

I saw something similar when we got back to the hotel. It was nearly 1am and when we exited the elevator onto our floor, the lights in our hallway were dim, but came on when we approached.

This has the added benefit of removing that bright bar of light from the hall that always creeps in under the door of my hotel rooms. Bonus.

My friend Lyle is always comparing open source efforts like OpenNMS to his efforts in renewable energy. In both cases we are trying to strive against the inertia of how things have always been done, and there is also that eureka moment when our clients understand that they can realize savings (in money, time, or carbon emissions) without much sacrifice, if any at all.



Oh, I got a stack of copies of his new book, so if your support renewal is near expect a book along with your OpenNMS shirts. Yours truly is featured prominently in one chapter.

Texas Open Source Symposium

Posted on by tarus

Well, my long lucky streak has ended. I ride on over 75 flights a year, but rarely do I get sick, due to a combination of compulsive hand washing and Zicam. However, after this last trip to Texas I ended up with a cold, so forgive me for taking so long to post this update.

I spent last Saturday at the inaugural Texas Open Source Symposium in San Angelo, Texas. It was a small conference but I had a good time. I love these “grass roots” shindigs because they are so different from the corporate-laden shows such as LinuxWorld.

I sat in on both of Patrick Michaud’s talks, one on the Parrot VM and one on Perl 6. I really enjoyed his lolcode examples in Parrot.

I also sat in on Eric Evans‘ (OGP) Mercurial presentation. Mercurial is a distributed code management system (a la CVS and Subversion). I thought it was interesting, although Eric later admitted he has since switched to git since he submitted the paper topic.

I met some cool people, and learned a few things. Jim Smith, another speaker, was staying at our hotel so he bummed a ride with us, and that was kinda cool. I also met Janet Swisher from Enthought, a company who sponsored the conference as well as a being previously unknown to me. Eric had visited their offices in Austin and found the whole place pretty amazing. I loved the quote from their website “Started with angel funding, it remains free of debt and venture capital.” Heh heh, “free of … venture capital”. Not sure why that line tickles me so much.

Imagine that. A company run by making a profit. Of course, John Willis would say it doesn’t have a chance, but I’m going to keep an eye on them.

The organizer’s took us out for teppanyaki at a local restaurant. Overall, except for my cold, it was a nice time and might worth checking out next year.

The GSoC Process: A Tragedy in One Act

Posted on by tarus

In just a few weeks I will hit the sixth anniversary of the day I became a maintainer of OpenNMS, and the day I started making a living selling services around open source software.

I know a lot of people thought I was crazy and that there was no way I was going to survive “selling free software” but I could see the real power in an open source approach to network management. To this day I can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. I often use the line from The Matrix that it is one thing to know the path, and another thing to walk the path. Not only have I survived, OpenNMS has prospered and grown tremendously over the last 6 years.

Unfortunately, the term “open source” has been so abused that it is being used by any company that makes even a token attempt to expose some of their code. It’s a marketing term used to sell expensive “enterprise” software licenses – licenses that are as closed and locked as anything from, say, Microsoft.

I’m not sure where things went wrong. Recently something happened that caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about it, so I thought I share some of those thoughts.

esr referred to open source as a “gift economy“. It dawned on me that perhaps some of the problem is in that term “gift”.

According to Webster, a gift is “something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation”. The key there is “without compensation”. If compensation is required or expected, then it isn’t a gift.

We produce OpenNMS with no expectation of anything in return. When I was at LugRadio I met a number of people using OpenNMS without having purchased any of the commercial services products available for it, and they seemed a little embarrassed about not having paid anything. I told them not to worry about it – if you don’t need our services, don’t buy them. OpenNMS is a gift. Now, if you do buy commercial services then that money goes directly into making the project better, and the more services we sell the faster the product can improve, but there is absolutely no obligation to pay a cent.

(Note: unlike a true gift with no strings, there is one obligation with OpenNMS: honor the license.)

This doesn’t seem to be the case with the people who use “open source” as a marketing term. At SCaLE David talked with one such vendor, and the sales guy said that it really pissed him off when people came up and said they just used the “core” (or free) part of the product – he thought they should feel obligated pay for it. I was talking with the CEO of another similar firm about a controversial change he was proposing and how it would affect the community. He said that since they gave them the product in the first place, if they “didn’t like it, f*** ’em”.

It’s just so foreign to my experience. Back in 2002 when it was just me, it was the community of strangers around OpenNMS that kept me going. I didn’t have anyone else: no venture capital, no investment, just a project and some people who thought it was worth doing. Their involvement was a gift to me, something given without any expectations in return. I will always be grateful. In recognition of that time I came up with my two rules for OpenNMS:

1) OpenNMS will never suck.
2) OpenNMS will always be free.

So with that long preamble let me get the real meat of this post: Google.

I am an unabashed Google fan. Yeah, they are worth a lot of money and they make a lot of money, but if you look at the first Google page to the current one, not much has changed. It’s still minimalist and clean. They avoided the temptation to clutter it up.

And Google isn’t open source.

While they may use a lot of open source technology, Google is not and has never claimed to be an open source company. Yet with the Google Summer of Code they have done more for open source projects that any other vendor I can name. OpenNMS was lucky enough to become involved this year, mainly due to the efforts of Ben as an admin for our involvement, and we were awarded seven slots – seven people to help make OpenNMS a better product.

To put this into perspective, this is as if Google had given us US$35K.

Unfortunately, there was a downside. There was a person we were really interested in having work with us, but we thought he had been accepted by another project. When we found out that wasn’t the case, it was too late and we were out of slots. The guy was extremely enthusiastic and we thought he’d be a great member of the team, so we sprang into action to see what could be done.

I was on the west coast and was pretty removed from the action, so all I knew to do was to write Chris Dibona, one of the few people I know at Google. Ben, meanwhile, was talking with Leslie Hawthorn, the self-described “Den Mother” for GSoC, to see if something could be done. He was so concerned about getting this straightened out that he was doing this during breaks of Spamalot, a play he was attending.

Unfortunately, the person involved was taking the news poorly. Maybe somewhere along the way the gift of a GSoC slot turned into an expectation. My guess is that anyone as enthusiastic as this guy would quickly channel his disappointment into anger. This anger took the form of lashing out at Google, which was pretty unfair.

Tragically, at the very moment Ben had convinced Leslie to award us an extra slot for this guy, he posted another attack that ruined any chance he had of a slot within GSoC. He claimed to have been “betrayed by open source”. It was as when Romeo plunged in the knife seconds before Juliet woke up. So not only did he not get to be part of GSoC, OpenNMS lost a slot that could have been used to better the project.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is to never forget the gift aspect of open source. It requires a certain amount of patience. Everyone is walking the path, although some are taking a more direct route than others. I hope that this GSoC candidate has learned something from the experience, just as I hope that the clients of the open source poseurs realize that they are paying for proprietary code that is no different, in the end, than commercial software.

By running our organization profitably, OpenNMS will be around for years to come, and thanks to companies like Google and the efforts of Leslie Hawthorn it just keeps getting better all of the time. Many thanks, Leslie, for your gift. We won’t squander it.

Uhuru Source

Posted on by tarus

John Mark over at Hyperic posted a blog the other day in part about Bruce Perens’ candidacy for the OSI board and he asked me to comment about it.

Now, John Mark works for Hyperic and I work for the OpenNMS Group and our two companies are partners, so I look with fondness on the folks over at Hyperic (heck, they even invite us to play in their NCAA bracket). But I disagree with their business model being called “open source” and every time I do it publicly, it results in a little more bad blood between our companies. That is something I really don’t want, to be honest.

What Hyperic does is publish some of their code under the GPL, a fine and noble open source license, but a portion of their code is proprietary and requires a commercial license to use just like any other commercial software product. This is much better than, say, HP, which requires that you purchase their API to integrate with OpenView, but it is a long way from the ideals set forth when open source was started.

The sad part is that this form of “open source” publishing, what I call the “shareware” model, is much more the norm than, say, what we do with OpenNMS. If you want VC money in “open source” these days, you have to adopt this model. The idea of having 100% of the code free and to put the majority control of a project into the hands of others scares the hell out of investors.

It’s not that the shareware model is wrong, or bad, or evil, it’s just different from what I’ve always known as open source. The sad fact is that “open source” these days is little more than a marketing term.

When we go to trade shows, people will come up to our booth and ask about our “per node” pricing. I give them a confused look as say that OpenNMS is open source. They will have often come from another booth where they were told that to get all of the features of an “open source” product they had to pay. Thus the fact that I have “open source” on my booth sign now implies to the market that there is some “catch” in order to get the most features out of the product. The term has been diluted and made almost meaningless.

While I wish Bruce the best of luck with his campaign, I’m thinking it’s time to simply come up with a new term. Something with less interpretive leeway than, say, the word “open”.

I’ve suggested to a few friends that we name the new initiative “Uhuru Source”. Taking a cue from the Ubuntu folks, “uhuru” is the Swahili word for “freedom” (and also where Lt. Uhura of Star Trek fame got her name). Uhuru Source would embrace the concepts of free software set up by Bruce and esr so long ago, and mean more than just the ability to see some source code.

What Ever Happened to Network Management?

Posted on by tarus

I’ve been doing network management for a long time. Old timers like me and John Willis remember when the “Big 4” not only made exciting products, they were the only game in town (although some will disagree with the “exciting products” bit)

Coté sent me a link today to an article entitled “What ever happened to network management?“. It was by Dennis Drogseth, a pretty respected analyst that I happened to meet a couple of years back in those halcyon days where you could get a six-figure salary for spelling SNMP.

He starts off with a short history of the management marketplace circa 2000 and how most of those players have been acquired by larger companies such as EMC, CA and IBM. To me the money quote was:

In many of these platforms, politics have gotten in the way of effective integration, leaving network management and its potentially transcendent technologies (analytics, discovery, etc.) in a virtual limbo between foundation and stepchild.

I used these products and can attest to the “political” aspect that is a large part of deploying them. This is not cheap software. I can remember one US$500K Concord deal for a national bank where it turned out that Concord’s Network Health was exactly the wrong solution, but no Director drops a half a million of corporate money and then admits he made a mistake.

I happen to know what happened to network management: it went open source. Network management at scale has always been such a complex problem that solutions were made up of a combination of software and consulting expertise. Consultants like myself want to do what’s best for our clients, and the politics of the commercial frameworks sometimes prevented that, or at least made our jobs harder. Open source offers us a plethora of software tools to use in our solutions. While I am partial to OpenNMS of course, if it doesn’t fit a particular environment another open source tool can be deployed. Without the huge licensing fees, a decision can be made with far less politics and far less heartache should it turn out to be the wrong one.

There is always the question of whether or not open source software is ready for the big time. I’m hoping that question is slowly being put to bed. When TechTarget interviewed 1300 of its readers and asked what management platform they used, the answer was OpenNMS, followed by products from HP and IBM. With OpenNMS, system management tools like Hyperic and configuration management from Ziptie providing real alternatives to expensive commercial solutions, the consultants who drove adoption of those solutions now have other options.

Dennis doesn’t mention open source at all in his article. Perhaps five years from now he’ll write an article entitled “What ever happened to closed source network management?”.

A Question of Trust

Posted on by tarus

I went to the beach this weekend for a short vacation. On the way back I stopped for fuel, and while I was pumping a man came up to me with a sob story about a broken fuel pump and how he needed some money to get home.

This happens to me about every three years or so, and I always react the same way.

I give them money.

Yeah, I know that this labels me as a sucker, but I would much rather give $10 to ten people who are lying about why they need it than to not give it to one person who did.

On the other hand, panhandling doesn’t work on me (I rarely give money to people who accost me on the street) but busking sometimes does.

It comes down to a matter of trust.

Since I work in open source software some might assume that I’m some long-haired, love thy neighbor hippy type. This is not true. Being a geek I tend to model my behavior on what makes sense. Creating a community to develop OpenNMS is simply the most rational way to create a rapidly growing enterprise-grade network management framework. What makes it work is that the people involved have a mutual respect and trust in each other.

When I started out with OpenNMS, I decided to trust in a number of people that I didn’t know. That trust has really paid off into making OpenNMS what it is today. This wasn’t a leap of blind faith but an effective strategy based on game theory called “Tit for Tat“. Also known as “equivalent retaliation” the idea is that you trust the other person at first and then behave as they do. If they prove trustworthy, you continue to trust them. If not, you stop trusting them. It has been shown that over time this is a very successful behavior.

So why do I bring this up? Back in 2005 a company called Cittio was brought to my attention. Their stuff looked a whole lot like OpenNMS with a better GUI. I investigated it and it turns out that they are using OpenNMS and probably a number of other open source tools, but they seem to be going out of their way to hide that fact. I called Jamie Lerner, the founder, and he assured me that they were abiding by the GPL. Since I didn’t have any proof to the contrary, I decided to trust him.

It seems that trust was misplaced.

I recently got an e-mail from a company that was looking at both OpenNMS and Cittio. It appears that Cittio is not telling potential clients that any open source software is being used, at least not at the level of detail required by the GPL. From the client “Oh, Watchtower told us that they used some open source apps but did not mention as to what they used”. When I brought up the fact that parts of Watchtower are based on OpenNMS, the client replied “I could not find one ounce of mention on their website to OpenNMS or any other Open Source code that is running on this product. That really irritates me.”

I should also mention that this client is in final negotiations with Cittio (they dropped their initial price considerably) so we’re not talking a first contact cold call here – they are ready to close this deal without a single detail concerning their use of open source.

So I have moved Cittio into the “untrustworthy” column.

At the moment I really can’t do anything about this. We are doing well enough that I could get lawyers involved, but I’d rather spend any extra money we have on making OpenNMS better than pursuing a company like Cittio. I am hoping that word of mouth is enough to get people asking the right questions when dealing with them.

While part of this pisses me off another part finds it kind of amusing. The part that makes me angry is that a lot of people have donated significant time to build OpenNMS and when someone comes along an exploits that work it is just not right.

The amusing part is that this situation reminds my of the old joke about the Space Shuttle program. The Soviet’s had a very similar program called “Buran”.


Image yoinked from here.

As you can see, the two systems are strikingly similar. The joke after the Challenger disaster was that it put the US space program back 2 years and the Soviet one back 10.

In the same vein, it looks like Cittio would like to run their stuff on Windows. When we announced our Windows port, one of the outstanding issues was that jrrd had not been completely ported yet. So it was funny to see a question on our mailing list from Orhan Aglagul, a Senior Software Engineer at Cittio according to LinkedIn, asking about compiling the jrrd.dll. He used his gmail.com account when he posted on our list, but he used his cittio.com account when he asked the same question on the RRDtool list. Sneaky, huh? And not very smart, as I doubt Tobi has any clue as to what jrrd is.

When Ben is able to finish jrrd.dll (it is not needed for OpenNMS to run) I guess that will save Cittio some time, although it is published under the GPL and not the LGPL and thus they can’t use it without exposing at least some of their code to the GPL. It doesn’t appear this has stopped them in the past.

If there are any Cittio customers out their that have purchased the product and received the source code I would be interested in hearing from you and I will update this post accordingly. Likewise, if you have purchased the product and not received the source code, I would be interested in learning about that too.

Let me be clear that I welcome people to take and use the OpenNMS code, tweak it to your heart’s content and perhaps contribute some of that work back to the project. I even welcome people who make changes for their personal use and don’t, for whatever reason, feel like sharing those changes. But I have to draw the line and someone taking the code, hiding or at the bare minimum obsfucating that fact, and distributing it to others in violation of the license.

I'm Too Sexy for my Shirt

Posted on by tarus

Sometimes I read back over my posts and I am certain that I come across as an arrogant a$$hole. I really don’t mean to; I just can’t help but to speak my mind on things such as the meaning of “open source”, running a business, beer, scotch, whether or not the Patriots should be the first team in the NFL with an undefeated season and other important issues.

My one true talent is the ability to surround myself with people smarter than me. Their only fault is, perhaps, hanging with me in the first place. I can’t help but think that anyone outside looking in would think “man, that’s a great team, but what’s with the loudmouth?” (grin)

In my zeal in promoting OpenNMS and our free and open ways it might seem as that I hate everyone and everything not OpenNMS. That’s not true. I’m pretty much for anything that works, even commercial solutions, and if something else works for you, great. As a services company it would actually cost me to try to support our product in the wrong environment.

Believe it or not I actually like and at times get along with other people in the field of network management. Take Eric Dahl at Zenoss, for example. We’ve met a couple of times and he’s a nice guy (not quite as nice as Ethan Galstad, but who is). At barcampESM he promised to send me a shirt and I promised to wear it.

Is it true that black is slimming? Or does this shirt make me look fat?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

Anyway – a big shout out to Eric for the polo. I’m putting an OpenNMS polo in the mail for him tomorrow. Peace out.

Why All the Hate?

Posted on by tarus

I got a note from Javier this morning with the title “Why All the Hate?”. It made me sit up, because I like Javier, a lot, and if my post on VC money came across as hateful, I want to try to patch things up.

I met Javier at last year’s SCaLE conference and took an immediate liking to him. He loves his company, his product and his people as much as I love mine. We’re hermanos. Heck, you can even rearrange the letters of his name to spell “i.e. Tarros Veloj”, which means we have almost the same name, too.

This is why I hate writing about the industry. For people who do not know me it seems like I hate VCs, I hate the big four, I hate the little four, and I hate their communities.

Let me quickly address those points in reverse order.

First of all, to the users of all those other network management products out there: if it works for you, great. Don’t even consider OpenNMS. There is no reason to replace something that works. If this means you can take a shareware open source product and make it do what you need it to do, within your budget (of both time and money), then it is a great solution. If it requires a fully commercial product to do what you need done, great. Sometimes it makes better sense to spend a little money to save a lot of time.

As for the “little four”, I don’t agree with shareware open source models and nothing is ever going to change that. That doesn’t mean I “hate” them. In the context of traditional software companies it makes a lot of sense. Heck, the creators of MySQL and Xensource can thumb their noses at me from their Ferraris. But I truly believe that years from now the projects that are still recognizable as open source won’t have a commercial software component. I’m betting my Ferrari on that.

The “big four”? Heck, they don’t know we exist. They are so big and so far away I’d be surprised if they cared very much about open source at all. The guys in the trenches tasked with making those solutions work are still cool, as I rediscovered at barcampESM, hangin’ with the guys from BMC and Tivoli. No hate, I just believe there will eventually be a better way.

And finally, VCs. I don’t hate VCs. They are out to make money just like I am. Shareware open source models have made a lot of money for some over the past few months.

I will admit that VCs scare me a little.

They scare me because, as I mentioned in a comment on Jack Hughes’s blog, the goals of a VC firm that invests in open source based on a software revenue model are not the goals of the community at large.

Case in point: if I used the free version of a shareware open source product, wouldn’t I benefit from having the entire software available at no cost? Wouldn’t I be able to contribute more if I could focus on new features instead of trying to replicate existing “enterprise” ones? Thus the community goal of getting as much functionality as possible into the open source part of the product negatively and directly affects software revenue.

I would love for someone to point out to me the flaw in my logic here.

This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t consider investment from a VC firm. If the focus is on revenues outside of software, then a strong community means a stronger product and ultimately more money. Thus VC investment works to drive the community and everyone benefits. I’ve even laid out how I’d do it should we decide to accept such an investment.

Note: for those of you who think I’m being naive and that I just don’t want to give up control of the OpenNMS Group, I already have.

So, enough of this for now. Time to get focused on 1.3.10. And remember, I’m not a hater, yo.

Show Me Da Money (a Cautionary Tale)

Posted on by tarus

Okay, I usually don’t like writing about the new batch of so-called “open source” management companies. Since we are trying to position OpenNMS against products like Tivoli and OpenView, they really aren’t who we are trying to compete against, and since we don’t have millions of dollars in investment it could come across as if I was a big whiner, boo-hooing about our poverty.

That really isn’t the case. We made a decent amount of money last year (made as in “net profit“, not “gross sales“), and I’d be more than willing to welcome in an investor or two who shared our vision. It’s finding such an investor that has been hard.

So here is a post about the “little four” management companies: Groundwork, Hyperic, Qlusters and Zenoss.

Let’s drop Qlusters right off the bat, since they aren’t really in the same “monitoring/fault” space as the other three. It just goes to show you that the guy who came up with the name really wasn’t doing his homework (grin). All three have raised quite a bit of money:

Groundwork: US$25 million in three rounds
Hyperic: US$10 million in two rounds
Zenoss: US$15 million in two rounds, including US$11 million announced today

This money was raised from venture capital (VC) firms. Now VC firms exist for one reason, to make money. The way they make money is with a “liquidity event,” which is when something happens to turn the assets of the company in which they invest into cash. This can happen as an IPO or an acquisition. Open source IPOs are rare, and with MySQL being acquired by Sun, the closest hope for an open source IPO in the near future is gone. So that leaves acquisition.

VCs want these companies to spend money, and quickly. They need to get the value of the company up to the point where their share is approximately ten times the amount they invest, and they tend to want it within 5 years. Examining our “little three” at a minimum they need:

Groundwork: US$250 million
Hyperic: US$100 million
Zenoss: US$150 million

That’s a lot of money, especially for a company that plans to give their software code away.

But wait, these companies don’t give their software away. Only a small part of it is open. A large portion of the revenue that is to drive these massive valuations must come from software licenses. By accepting this money they have pretty much promised not to open up the rest of their code. If they did, their software license revenue model would be in jeopardy, which would make the VCs very unhappy.

You don’t want to make the VCs mad.

Example 1: Last year I learned about Medsphere. Started by Scott and Steve Shreeve, their goal was to create better medical software using the open source development model. They accepted some VC funding, developed some code, and released it on Sourceforge. They were promptly sued by their board to the tune of US$50 million for releasing trade secrets. I’m serious – an open source company sued its founders because they … opened their source. And I’m not talking little bitty counts either – they were sued under RICO (Superior Court of California, Orange County, Case 06CC07475). RICO was designed to catch mobsters, but the severe penalties imposed by the law (i.e. they can seize your house, the kid’s college fund, your 401(k)) are used by unscrupulous lawyers to scare the bejeezus out of you. The case was settled last October, but the Shreeves are no longer associated with the project or Medsphere.

Example 2: One of the first companies to jump on the open source management bandwagon was Groundwork. Riding on the popularity of Nagios, they built proprietary software tools around it. President and CEO Ranga Rangachari made the rounds of all the industry rags with his vision for how to make money with open source. However, if you look on the Groundwork site today, his name has been quietly removed from both the Management Team and Board pages.

Remember, don’t make the VCs mad.

I have to wonder. If acquisition is the main exit for these companies, why would someone like IBM or Sun want to pay US$100 million or more when they could pick up, I dunno, something like OpenNMS for half that? (grin)

I sincerely want to wish Zenoss luck with their new investment. I enjoy the competition even if I dislike what I see as the shareware open source model, and it makes me even more determined to keep OpenNMS 100% free and open. But I don’t dislike the people at Zenoss (heck, one of my old friends is a sales guy for them) and I am very fond of the folks over at Hyperic as well (to the point of feeling bad about my spat with Doug MacEachern on Slashdot so long ago – he’s an amazingly nice guy).

But as a profitable project with a pure open source business model, we’re gonna be dogging their steps every bit of the way, providing for free what they provide for a fee, and diluting their revenue streams. At least I don’t have any VCs to get mad at me.

Happy New Year and 2007 in Review

Posted on by tarus

Well, 2008 is here. It seems like yesterday that I was participating in the non-event known as Y2K. I really like the New Year’s holiday. At OpenNMS we officially close for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day to allow us to spend some time with our families, some time to relax and time to regroove our brains, which tend to get pretty flat when you spend as much time working on OpenNMS as we do.

I have great hopes for this year. We hope to have out two, count ’em, two stable releases, 1.6 and 1.8, as well as improving documentation and the user experience. Luckily it is easier to make a project like OpenNMS, with strong, scalable internals, prettier than it is to make a pretty application scale.

Another thing I hope to do is travel less. I did 75K miles on 62 airplanes last year, and visited 5 countries outside of the US. It was fun but a little tiring. So Matt got this week’s trip to Italy (grin).

Speaking of last year, 2007 was pretty solid.

From a project point of view, we did 6 releases (well, 7, but 1.3.4 didn’t count) and our goal was 4. We held our third Dev-Jam back at UMN (this year’s conference will be at Georgia Tech in Atlanta) and inducted three new members into the OGP.

From the commercial standpoint it was also a solid year. It’s nice being profitable, as we don’t have the same worries as a company with impatient investors, and we were able to continue to deliver on our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money”. We lost our first employee. DJ decided that he missed working in an office and his current situation didn’t let him move to North Carolina. He is still very active in the project. But when one door closes, another opens, and this time it was two. Ben was finally able to come back to work full time on OpenNMS and Jeff joined us late in the year bringing a lot of talent and experience with him. I’ve worked with some great teams in the past, but man, this is the frickin’ dream team.

Of course, we are also looking to grow by a couple of positions in 2008. If you are interested, the best way to get a full time job with OpenNMS is to get involved in the project. My last three hires have all come from the OGP, although it’s not a requirement.

The year 2007 saw a lot of new companies hitching their wagons to open source. To be quite honest I haven’t seen many embrace it as purely as OpenNMS does, and I have had to restrain myself a number of times from getting into the “my project has more downloads/features/users/marketers than your project” destructive cycle. We’ve been at this since 2000, so we have some handle on what works and what doesn’t, and what is important and what isn’t.

From the standpoint of a user, use something that works. If it works for you, it’s good, no matter if it is open or closed or a hybrid. Tools should be designed to let you focus on your business, not the tools (that’s why I use a Mac).

From the standpoint of our project, it’s the community. We let people contribute and change large chunks of functionality to OpenNMS. Heck, these are the people who use it the most, so they probably have some idea on what it should do. We don’t just give lip service to the efforts of the people outside of the OpenNMS Group, we let them choose in large part the destiny of the whole application.

And finally from the standpoint of our company, by focusing almost entirely on meeting the needs of our customers and having a great time doing it, the money comes. We ply all of our profit right back into the business (my main vehicle is a 1993 Honda Civic) which in turn makes OpenNMS better, which drives more customers. It’s a silly idea in today’s venture-driven world, but it works for us.

To everyone involved with OpenNMS, thanks for 2007. In 2008 let’s go do great things.

Happy New Year.