Commentary

AmazonMP3

Posted on by tarus

To me, open source and open source efforts like OpenNMS are about finding powerful and flexible solutions to difficult problems because the alternatives are expensive and clunky. It seems that too many companies are more focused on customer lock-in and revenue streams based on things like per-node pricing than on addressing their customers needs.

But our industry pales compared to the music industry. I’ve ranted elsewhere about this, so I won’t repeat things here, but I came across something last night that suggests that there is hope.

My wife and I were watching TV and a new Dell commercial came on which showed older technology exploding and being smashed with a wrecking ball while a woman sang Que Sera Sera in the background. It was a cool arrangement of the song (although I am partial to the Sly and the Family Stone version) and my wife wondered who sang it.

A quick Google search turned up the artist as Jennifer Terran. But better yet there was a link to an AmazonMP3 page where the song was available for 89 cents. It was a high quality mp3 (256 bps) and DRM free.

I bought it. I already had some funds at Amazon due to a gift certificate and the process was painless. I had the song before the next commercial break.

I’ve shied away from buying songs at the iTunes store because the iPod is only one of the places I listen to music and most of the music there contains DRM. I don’t want to have to keep up with usernames and passwords. I don’t “steal” music but I do enjoy it, so most of the time I buy the physical CD and rip it once it arrives, although some music executives sick with greed think I should have a copy per device.

Now I have an alternative, and the instant gratification factor means I’ll probably be spending more on music than I have in the past.

One improvement I’d make is to allow for track to album upgrades. At the moment, according to the e-mail I received back from Amazon, if you purchase a track or two from an album and then decide to purchase the whole thing you do not get a credit for the tracks you’ve already purchased, unlike the iTunes store’s Complete My Album feature.

But for DRM free files I’ll live with that.

Thanksgiving

Posted on by tarus

[Warning: The following post is an exercise in navel gazing. Feel free to skip.]

The fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving day in the US. It’s an interesting holiday since it falls on a Thursday, so about 3/4 of the people in the US get a four-day weekend. It is the official start of the end of year holiday season, and it is a time to get together with friends and family, to over indulge in eating, and to reflect on the past year.

My title at The OpenNMS Group is CEO, and often I think I suck at the job. I have worked for a lot of personally successful CEOs, but when I look at myself I don’t see in me the qualities I see in them. Note that I didn’t say that their companies were successful, but that they were “personally” successful. When their company failed they just went and got a job at another one. I can’t separate my personal success from that of OpenNMS and the people who work with me, and I lack the ability to pander to the world at large in search of Google hits and downloads. When we have a happy customer I don’t feel like that is “news”, that’s our job, and you won’t ever see me write a press release about “OpenNMS is the first to run on [new operating system]” especially if it is neither true nor newsworthy. As someone who is running their first company, it is very hard to look at what others are doing and not follow, but I can’t bring myself to do it if it isn’t the right thing to do.

At the OpenNMS project we have two main rules:

1) OpenNMS will not suck.

2) OpenNMS will always be free.

The second rule prohibits me from taking the easy way out and just coming up with a revenue model based on software licensing. Paying for software is the antithesis of open source, no matter what anyone else says. This means that the OpenNMS Group is a services organization – we do not sell software.

As a services organization, as well as an open source project, we live and die based upon the quality of our people. Thus I love Thanksgiving as a chance to give my guys a long weekend off, to spend with their families and re-groove their brains. Real CEOs refer to their employees as resources: like they were as replaceable as a bushel of wheat or a barrel of oil. My team is made up of people: extremely talented individuals, unique and irreplaceable.

With that long preamble let me jump into what I am thankful for:

I am thankful that OpenNMS was dropped into my lap. As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t start OpenNMS. It was scary, and probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, but it has been one of the most rewarding decisions I’ve ever made.

I am thankful for the community – the folks that make OpenNMS possible, especially those in the OGP. OpenNMS is far from a one man show – that’s why we have 25 developers and not just 2.

I am thankful for my team at the OpenNMS Group. It would be a honor to work with you guys anywhere. When we are successful it will be all due to you, and in the slim chance we fail I hope you can forgive my leadership.

Life is about the journey, and even on the bad days I can’t think of anything else I would rather be doing. The thing I am most thankful for is my family who made this all possible. There are few people out there who would be so understanding. Hey, in those terms I am probably the most “personally successful” CEO on the planet.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Working from Home

Posted on by tarus

I made it to Frankfurt without incident. Well, except that the taxi driver took me to the wrong hotel (same name, different part of town). I’m now ensconced in my fashionable Euro-hotel with expensive Internet access, and ready to work on getting into the local time as fast as possible.

International travel has certainly changed in the 10 or so years since I was last here. The rise of international data networks means that I can get here solely with my passport and electronic tickets, use my ATM card to get local currency, and once on the Internet it is almost like I’d never left home. No more travelers checks, paper tickets, expensive phone calls or time spent in line at the currency exchange.

These networks have also changed the way companies are organized. At The OpenNMS Group we are often spread out geographically, yet it doesn’t seem to matter. This week I’m in Germany, Dave is up at Quantico, Matt will be in Durham part of the week, Ben is in Vancouver (Canada) part of the week and Jeff is in Atlanta. But through IRC, Jabber, e-mail and Skype it is just another day in the office. This ability to run a company with a distributed workforce translates directly into the ability to run a distributed project such as OpenNMS, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on what makes the arrangement successful.

Trust: When I worked at NORTEL the phrase “Working from Home” was code for “I’ll be checking e-mail occasionally, but for the most part I’m slacking off for the day”. It takes a lot of trust in your people to know that you can leave them alone unsupervised and know that the are actually working. This is usually easy for the most part at OpenNMS because we only hire people who are extremely passionate about what they do. When you are selling services, your reputation is in your people and it is tied directly to your success. Thus I rarely worry about my guys not working (in my mind they work too hard), but that does lead into the subject of …

Time: At OpenNMS we are results driven. I’m writing this at about 10pm local time on a Sunday, which is well outside of normal business hours, and my team tends to work just as hard. Work gets done at all hours of the day and night. But it is important to set aside some period of time during the day where everyone is available. There is nothing more frustrating than needing some help and not being about to get it. In a traditional business office, one could just walk over to another office or cubical to ask for help. When everyone is separated by considerable distances and sometimes oceans, being able to quickly reach someone is important, and to have some kind of standardized work hours helps with that.

Tools: Another important aspect of running a distributed company is the choice of tools. For me, e-mail is king. My life is driven by my Inbox, as it also serves as my “to-do” list. During a normal business day I can expect a response to an e-mail sent to the team within 10 to 15 minutes.

If I need something sooner, or if it is just a quick question, we also use the Jabber instant messaging protocol. We set up a private Jabber server for just employees. While I love chatting with people, when I’m on public IM services I sometimes get overloaded with “Dude! How’s it going?” messages. It is key to have the IM equivalent of the “red phone” where people are quick to respond and the Signal to Noise ratio is high. We’ve had to actually implement strict “auto away” policies where if you are away for even a couple of minutes you status will reflect it, because unlike e-mail being unresponsive on IM is frustrating.

We also use a number of other collaborative tools. We have an internal mailing list, shared calendars and an internal wiki. The goal is to make sure that everyone in the company has access to the information they need, and no one is the sole source of any information that might be needed to address our client’s issues. We are also starting to use video more, but as anyone who has seen me can attest, this is not necessarily a good thing (grin).

Targets: You can’t run any company without targets, especially when your goal is to provide the world’s de facto network management platform and your opponents are IBM, HP, CA and BMC. We set deadlines, and although we don’t always meet them we always seem to work better and more cohesively when they approach. When your team is separated, it is important that they all know what the immediate goal is so they know what to work on and feel that the work they are doing is useful and important.

Temperament: One last piece to the puzzle of running a successful distributed company is finding people who can work well outside of the traditional office environment. Social scientists often talk about the concept of a “Third Place” meaning a place to gather outside of home and work. But what if home and work are the same place? There are a number of people who do not work well in isolation. The work/life balance becomes harder to maintain. When I started working with OpenNMS I actually had to set up a room in my house devoted just to work. Otherwise I found myself working all of the time and workplace issues started to bleed over into my personal life. With the growing availability of Internet access in a number of public places, it is becoming easier to find a place to work that removes that sense of isolation that can arise from working from home.

No matter how well your team works when apart, it is still important to get together once in awhile (we aim for once a month). I can tell in myself and amongst my team that prolonged periods of working without real world social interaction causes the bad parts of the job to seem worse than they really are, and the good parts less good. Even if it is just sitting together in a room working and listening to music from AirTunes, optimism and pride in what we are doing is just easier to spread that way.

Which is one of the reasons I travel so much – to spread the love (grin). I am really looking forward to meeting OpenNMS fans in Frankfurt this week as there is nothing that can replace meeting face to face. It is one way to build the community which is so important to success. I’ll be sure to post more as the week unfolds.

Drought

Posted on by tarus

Yes, it’s another weather related post. The weather in North Carolina has been on everyone’s mind since we are under exceptional drought conditions.

low lake level

The water level in the pond outside of our office is so low that mollusks are now within reach of the blue heron that often stops by, leaving the shore littered with their shells.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a weather station out at the farm and I used the HTTP data collector in OpenNMS to store information from that system in RRD files. It used the software supplied by the vendor, and to be quite frank it wasn’t very good. It would gather the data from the weather station and create HTML files locally, and I’d use scp to move them up to the server. Unfortunately the process would hang every day or so, and I’d end up with long, flat lines in my OpenNMS graphs since the web page wouldn’t update.

I remembered that the serial protocol for communication between the computer and the weather station console was published, if not open, so I went looking for the specs in case I could code up a script or something to bypass the packaged software and get access to the data.

Instead I found something much, much better.

There is a project on Sourceforge called “wview” which does pretty much anything I could have asked for and more. It’s lightweight, fast, runs from the command line, and has many more features than the vendor’s software, and it’s GPL’d. It was obviously written by a weather geek for weather geeks.

It provides a great web page out of the box, and even has Weather Underground integration built right in.

While the vendor probably needed a piece of software in order to drive sales of the hardware, they obviously focused on making it pretty versus useful. That added complexity resulted in crashes, whereas wview has run like a tank. I am just thankful that the product manufacturer was wise enough to open the protocol which enabled wview to exist.

This is open source at its finest. Ben went ahead and added it to fink unstable, so now I’ve got package management on top of everything else. That was one small way to give back to the project, and I also sent in a donation (which means wview now has as many donations as OpenNMS [grin]).

Know what’s strange? Just like when I bought In Rainbows I was happy to spend the money. I didn’t feel like I was forced to do it.

It seems that so many industries now seem to think that the only way to get people to buy stuff is to force them. The music industry in particular seems intent on persecuting their customers, and the US wireless phone market seems to be getting more and more proprietary everyday, with the major carriers coming up with more ways to lock in their clients.

The success I’ve had with wview makes me wonder what would happen if a little openness entered the wireless phone market. What wonderful applications would be written from the point of view of users and not manufacturers? The carrier that took that leap would get my business, and I’d be happy to give it to them.

But my guess is that it’ll be a rainy day around here before that happens.

Somewhere In Rainbows, Bluebirds Fly

Posted on by tarus

Fourth quarter for the OpenNMS Group has always been crazy. We start off slow in first quarter and then slowly build until the end of the year when things go wild. Last year we did half of our yearly business in the last quarter. This year we did as much in our usually slow first quarter as we did in last year’s fourth, and it has just grown from there. We plow all of our excess revenue into the business, and we’ve just hired another top notch person to join our team (more on that in a few weeks when he starts).

Despite this success I am constantly told by those who know better that our business model sucks. Perhaps. If you come from the tradition of selling software, trying to figure out how to sell free software must be a little confusing. Still, that doesn’t prevent people from trying. Currently the most common model is to have a “free” part and proprietary part. The business plan is built heavily on the proprietary part, which is little different than purely commercial software.

The problem is that people fear change. For years the way to make money in software was to sell licenses. For years the way to make money in music was to get a big recording contract. In exchange for a huge cut of revenues, record companies would produce, promote and sell music. Their main advantage was the distribution channel. With the Internet, the problems of distribution have gone away.

I like music, but I’ve found lately that most of the new music I listen to tends to come from artists I learn about on the Internet. The music coming out of the traditional channels – with more emphasis on how the artist looks on MTV instead of on the music – has me searching for something decent to listen to. If I want to look at scantily clad beautiful people, there are websites for that. (grin)

While the music industry blames its woes on piracy and has resorted to suing its customers, I think it has more to do with the fact that the model is changing, and it is no longer possible for the record companies to maintain the levels of profits they have had in the past.

Think about it. How many times have I purchased Dark Side of the Moon? My first car (a 1972 Delta 88 Olds with a 455 V8) had an 8 track player. Then I bought the album on vinyl. I liked it so much I bought the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs master. Then I bought the CD when it was first available, and finally the re-mastered CD a few years later.

So I paid for the same content 5 times. I’m sure that money went somewhere, but I am willing to bet the bulk of it did not go to Pink Floyd.

When CDs first came out, they were pretty expensive. Now I can burn one on my computer for something like 3 cents. Yet CDs are still priced about the same (US$15-US$20) as they were in 1984. That can only mean that since production costs are lower profits must be higher.

But change is coming. Today I got In Rainbows, the latest album from Radiohead. It is a really good album, but almost as good was how I bought it. I went to the website (which was a bit slow due to traffic), added the download to my cart, and then it asked me how much I wanted to pay. Zero was an option. If you are distributing DRM-free music why not have zero as an option? According to the music industry, there should only be, what, one download right? Without DRM all of the pirate kiddies are just gonna steal it.

Wrong.

I paid £5. Ben paid £5. I have a couple of other friends who also bought it. It was about US$1 per song, which is what you pay on iTunes, but I can play it on my computer, on the Phatbox in my car, and on my phone without worrying about DRM. Sure I am certain that there will be some theft of it, but with almost all of the money going directly to the band I think Radiohead is going to make more money with this album than any of their others, which should encourage them to continue to make great music.

The music industry is scared. They should be. No one really needs them anymore. I think the software industry should be scared as well. Companies have wised-up to the idea of “per server” licenses and proprietary lock-in. They are looking for a change.

OpenNMS is betting on that change by providing high quality, truly free/libre software. The accepted software model is to get a bunch of investment and market the hell out of your company. We are using the even more traditional model of “spend less than you earn”. Being cash positive may suck as a business plan if your goal is to sell out within five years, but it means we’ll be around after those five years, with an even stronger community and a stronger offering. To me it’s like beautiful music, and with OpenNMS we hope to prove, like Radiohead, that beautiful music doesn’t have to come with strings attached.

Happy Anniversary

Posted on by tarus

Today marks the third anniversary of The OpenNMS Group. Since we started with no venture money and pretty much nothing but a strong will to make OpenNMS the main management platform of choice, this is a nice milestone.

I have told the “OpenNMS” story a number of times, but never on this blog, so perhaps now would be a good time to tell it again.

I didn’t start OpenNMS, nor am I responsible for much of its beauty. Brighter people than me came up with the original architecture and design, and even brighter people than that keep it growing today.

Since I wasn’t there, my knowledge of how OpenNMS got started is pieced together from what various people have told me, so let me apologize in advance if I get things wrong or overlook someone that I should have mentioned.

OpenNMS was started in 1999 by Steve Giles, Luke Rindfuss and Brian Weaver. Steve was one of the founders of Onion Peel Software, which had just been sold to a company called Netplex. Onion Peel provided software and services around the HP OpenView suite of products, and a map management tool called Amerigo was probably their most famous product. Luke and Brian had both worked with Steve at Onion Peel.

Steve was eager to start another company (he’s one of of them “serial entrepreneurs“) and wanted to stay in the network management space. Now at this time companies like Riversoft had raised £83 million in investment, so it was almost impossible to compete in that space without a lot of money. Steve and company saw open source as an opportunity to develop the next-generation of management software without having to raise tons of capital.

They named the company PlatformWorks and started hiring. Ben Reed, one of the current OpenNMS employees, was employee number 5.

PlatformWorks was acquired by Atipa. Atipa was trying to follow in the footsteps of VA Linux, which had a record IPO. Both companies were trying to become the Dell or Compaq of Linux. This was before it was realized that software drivers aren’t really the issue, and that it’s more about the supply chain and getting that disk drive from Malaysia on time.

Anyway, with the market crash of 2000, Atipa needed a new business plan. They had a warehouse full of 1U servers, and this network management software, so why not create a network management appliance for small to medium sized businesses? Thus Oculan, “Your Eye on the Network”, was born.


The original Oculan OpenNMS team

Oculan used OpenNMS as the basis for its management application, but added quite a number of additional features and interfaces to make it easier to use. They still worked on OpenNMS as a separate project, as even though the bubble had burst people still needed to manage their networks and there was a lot of interest in an open source project for this.

I entered the picture in 2001. I joined Oculan on September 10th in order to build a services and support business around OpenNMS. The next day the world changed, and it became a lot harder to sell anything, much less this new idea of open source network management.

OpenNMS 0.8 had just been released. In the following months I worked to figure out this whole services business and to get some commercial customers. In 2002 we released OpenNMS 1.0, and I managed to sign up our first four customers (two of which are still customers).

Then in May of 2002 Oculan got new investors who wanted to make two major changes. They wanted to focus solely on the appliance and they didn’t want to open source any software. As copyright holders they are free to publish the code under any license they choose, although once something is published under a license such as the GPL it isn’t possible to “unpublish” it.

I believe I could have stayed at Oculan, but in the months I’d been working on OpenNMS I started to really see its potential. To be honest, when I first took the job I thought, hey, HP OpenView without the cost. But OpenNMS is much, much more than that, and without someone pretty much dedicated to working on it, it would die.

So I made one of the toughest decisions of my life. I went down to Steve’s office and asked for OpenNMS. Oculan would keep the copyright to 1.0, of course, but I would become the project’s maintainer and get the domain names, etc. We worked out the details and suddenly I was much more wedded to open source than I ever thought I would be.

That was the easy part. The hard part was telling my wife.

We live on a horse farm. The previous spring her company, Union Carbide, was purchased by Dow, and rather than move to Michigan she decided to leave, spend the summer working with the horses, and get a job in the fall. After 9/11 it was much harder to find a job, so she was working in a tack shop when I decided to do this. I had literally bet the farm on OpenNMS.

The really crazy part was that I didn’t know Java – at all. Sure, I had programmed before, but not seriously for several years. The guys at Oculan were forbidden to work on OpenNMS, since at that time the code base was so similar that there were IP issues, so I was on my own.

Or so I thought.

I started Sortova Consulting Company (pronounced Sore-toe-va even though it meant Sort Of A), bought The Big Black Book o’ Java, and got to work. Slowly I was able to fix some of the more grievous bugs, and slower still a community starting to gel around the project. I got more customers and was able to make my mortgage payment. The community kept me going when I really had no one else to help me, and even today I am humbled by their involvement.

On the farm I didn’t have access to any real form of broadband Internet access. I used DirecPC satellite, which was iffy in the best of times. Getting something like a T1 to the house was prohibitively expensive, and it was actually cheaper to rent an office downtown with DSL. So that’s what I did.

I decided to dump the satellite to save money (my “spend less than you earn” philosophy had gotten me this far) so I needed a dial-up provider. As one of those folks who buys local when I can, I called up the local ISP, Blast Internet Services. Always looking for new customers, I asked the guy who answered the phone what they used to monitor their network. He didn’t know, and suggested I “Talk to Lyle”.

Lyle Estill is one of the most interesting people I know. He’s one of the few people who can make a decision faster than me. To make a long story short, he liked the idea of open source, and since Blast was services company and Sortova was a services company, why not have two struggling companies struggle together?

So I put Sortova to bed and began working at Blast. It was great to have other people working with me. Business grew and OpenNMS kept getting better. In early 2004 we were able to hire two more people to work on OpenNMS, David Hustace and Matt Brozowski.

David and I have worked together at four different companies. There is no other person I’d rather have by my side in business. Even though he had to take a large pay cut and a great risk to come work on OpenNMS, he did it anyway.

Matt Brozowski has forgotten more about Java than I’ll ever know. He worked at IBM when they licensed Java from Sun, and he also did a lot of programming on NetView, so he understands network management. Matt has five kids, so the decision to come work on OpenNMS was also not an easy one, but he also did it anyway.

The three of us now formed the core team around OpenNMS, but a number of other people in the community had stepped up too. The lists now had a life of their own, and I didn’t feel the need to answer every single question.

In 2004 Lyle left Blast to work on sustainable energy in the form of biodiesel. I am honored to know that his exposure to open source communities has helped shape his own. With Lyle gone the three of us approached Blast to acquire the OpenNMS assets, and on September 1st, 2004, The OpenNMS Group was born.

Shortly after that we started the Order of the Green Polo to give an official form to the community, and together we set off to do great things.

So on this anniversary let me say thanks to everyone who made this possible. You helped write this story, now let’s go make history.

Slashdot Spanking

Posted on by tarus

The server for opennms.org has been around for almost five years now. It’s nothing fancy, but lately we’ve been running out of room on the disk drives so we went out and bought a new (refurb) server: lots of disk, lots of RAM, and two fast processors.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the website moved fast enough.

The opennms.org site uses Mediawiki, which is written in PHP and had a MySQL back end database. It’s not the most efficient site in the world (although we have used various tricks to make it faster) but it has served us well. The usual load average is around 0.10 to 0.20, with occasional peaks when the nightly tape dump runs or someone is doing a lot of mail synchronization.

This week has been a big press week for OpenNMS. SearchNetworking.com issued its annual user survey and OpenNMS was awarded Gold in the network management platform category. This was thrilling for the team for a variety of reasons. First, this was a user survey. As an open source project we don’t really know if anyone is using our work. We have a wall of postcards but we don’t get many, and we have a large number of downloads but we can’t really tell if they ever get installed much less used. The fact that it was end users that honored us with this award means that someone, somewhere must find it worthwhile to use it.

Second, this was a survey of all tools, not just open source applications. People often want to associate open source with “cheap” or “bargain” and it is really the wrong way to look at it. OpenNMS can be better to use simply because it is a better tool for the job. When deployments are measured in man-hours, an OpenNMS deployment can take a lot less time than a comparable OpenView or Tivoli deployment. That’s where the real cost savings can be had, although the fact that there are no licenses fees involved is just a bonus. (grin)

Finally, it was OpenView and Tivoli that OpenNMS beat out for the Gold. We have always positioned the product against these platforms. Having used those applications in the past, I think OpenNMS is much easier to use and deploy. Many new users are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of flexibility OpenNMS offers, and it can scare some of them off. But OpenNMS was never designed to compete against tools like What’s Up or Nagios, which many find easier to install. However, if OpenNMS can monitor 50,000 devices at one site, it can really scream on a network with 500.

Another bit of press for OpenNMS came from Network World. I was in a face-off where the question was “Can You Trust Your Network to Open Source”. I, of course, took the “yes” position against Roger Greene from Ipswitch (makers of the aforementioned What’s Up product). It was easy to write the piece but much harder to do the podcast. See, What’s Up isn’t designed to be an enterprise-grade management platform. It is built to be a real easy, pointy-clicky application that small to medium businesses can use to get a view into the status of their network. For many, the time spent installing What’s Up may be less than working with, say, a Nagios installation. Note I am not saying “for all”, but I’m all about “if it works, use it” and if What’s Up works for you, then great. I liked talking with Roger and could see his point, although some others had to point out the flaws in his arguments a little more strongly. (grin)

But I do stand by my comments on the podcast that it’s ease of use makes it a commodity. And it is priced as such – a basic install of What’s Up is much less than an OpenNMS support agreement. But for those who need a high end solution for either complex systems or large networks, or simply a system that allows for easy customization, it’s going to require something like OpenNMS.

All is well and good until Monday afternoon when my e-mail stopped working. I tried to SSH into the box and couldn’t reach it, so I opened a support ticket and tried to figure out what happened.

What happened is that we were on the front page of Slashdot, and it was spanking our little five year old white box server. This is the first reply I got from my provider:

At console, your server was very slow, and very hard to work with; I was unable to determine why SSH failed to respond to remote connections. Your server is under a lot of stress, the last load average I was able to get:

load average: 162.58, 171.32, 149.41

Heh.

I was finally able to get them to stop httpd which freed me up to work on the box, and I quickly moved the site to the new server. I upgraded to MediaWiki 1.9.3 and we installed squid front end for acceleration, and things look much better now (although it could be due to the fact that we’re not getting pounded like we were yesterday as much as the move to a new server).

To anyone who tried to visit us and failed, I apologize. And when you actually get to our sites, let me apologize again, because they aren’t the prettiest in the world. As we say on opennms.com: Professional Software, Amateur Marketing.

MyTechnologyLawyer

Posted on by tarus

Yesterday I was invited to talk about OpenNMS on the MyTechnologyLawyer radio show.

  It was the first time I’d done live radio and Scott Draughon decided to loosen me up by asking if I would go out with Nancy Pelosi. I pointed out that I hadn’t given it much thought, but since I was married probably not. He pressed, and asked if I wasn’t married – how about then? What if it was just coffee? I replied that I was much more of a Ruth Bader Ginsberg kinda guy and that brought the conversation to a halt. (grin)

It was a lot of fun. I was happy we were able to produce good radio since I tend to run on at the mouth a lot. I really like to pimp our community, and lately I’ve been also pimping SCaLE and it was Ilan Rabinovitch from that conference who invited us to be on the show.

So, check it out and I have also archived a copy on the OpenNMS server.

Open Source Is Not A Marketing Term – Part Deux

Posted on by tarus

Slashdot has an interesting article Has Open Source Lost Its Halo?”. It seems to mirror a lot of my ideas in the first Open Source Is Not A Marketing Term post.

In a post by Gordon Haff he brings up the term “predatory open source” to describe the actions by some companies to open source non-strategic products in order to undermine commercial competition.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. I have been saying for a long time that software is going to take two paths: it will either become a commodity or open.

Commodity software is not necessarily bad. The success of such things as World of Warcraft goes to show that there is a huge market for inexpensive, high-value software that “just works”.

But enterprise “anything” is hard – from network management, to CRM and ERP systems, to content management systems and databases. In these service intensive fields, solutions are best achieved by combining skilled experts with the proper software tools. I posit that it is impossible to come up with a “point and click” solution to enterprise problems.

As the goal of OpenNMS is nothing short of becoming the de facto network management platform of choice, I guess our project could be seen as being predatory to IBM’s Tivoli/Netcool, CA’s Unicenter, HP’s OpenView and BMC’s PATROL and other products, but I see it as just the natural evolution of the market. I doubt very seriously that we show up on the radars of those companies, but I bet we will soon.

The reason is that the fact that something is open source doesn’t make it successful, useful or cost saving. First and foremost it has to be better than other options. Eclipse isn’t the default Java IDE because it’s open source, it’s the default Java IDE because it’s extremely useful.

Which gets me harping on the community again. At SCaLE (presentations coming soon I’ve been promised) I had a slide paraphrasing Bill Clinton with “It’s the community, stupid”. If IBM open sourced Lotus 1-2-3, I doubt Steve Ballmer would be calling up Bill Gates screaming that Microsoft Excel was doomed.

The article mentions something else:

Rosenberg is more disturbed by the bandwagon jumpers: the companies, mostly startups, belatedly going open-source in order to ride a trend, while paying only lip service to the community and its values.

While jumping on the open source marketing bandwagon my produce a flurry of press and attention, in the long term it is doomed to fail. You can’t own a community and you can’t force a community to do something it doesn’t want to do, and in that fact is an inherent freedom. Piss off the community and they can just up and fork to another project. Try to co-opt a community and they’ll ignore you. But working with a community can change an entire industry.

I only have two rules with respect to OpenNMS:

  1. OpenNMS will never suck.
  2. OpenNMS will always be 100% free.

Luckily the community agrees with me.

Milton Friedman, R.I.P.

Posted on by tarus

Fourth quarter is traditionally hell for us here at OpenNMS, and this year is no different. I have a number of thoughts for blog entries that are growing more stale with the passing weeks, but I didn’t want to let this one go.

About a month ago Milton Friedman died. I am a huge fan of his work. For those who haven’t heard of him, he was a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a fierce advocate of capitalism.

Some of you might find it strange that a guy who makes his living on open source software would admire Dr, Friedman. There are those who equate open source with communism, hippies and Phish concerts (not that there’s anything wrong with that). However, I am involved with open source because it makes great business sense to me as a capitalist.

This does not mean I am a big fan of those often associated with capitalism. I belong to no political party, I disagree with the decision to invade Iraq, and I think we need to work harder to protect the environment. Some may sense a hint of hypocracy. For example, capitalism is often associated with big business, so how can I call myself both an environmentalist and a capitalist?

The problem is that at least in the U.S. we do not have true capitalism. Most of the time it works, but there are glaring examples of where it fails.

Take the energy industry for example. The single largest source of electricity production in the country is by burning coal. The U.S. has a lot of coal, so it makes sense that it would be used to produce electricity. If all electricity, regardless of source, is priced the same, and obtaining and producing electricity through coal is cheaper than, say, oil, it is more profitable to use coal and thus more producers will use it.

However, burning coal releases pollutants into the air. But in our current system, air is basically free. The fact that air isn’t really taken into account when calculating the cost of a coal plant is called an externality. It’s a failure in the market, not a failure within capitalism itself. If we could accurately capture the cost of externalities, the market could correct itself and coal energy might be priced higher than other forms, causing a decrease in use.

What in the world does this have to do with OpenNMS and open source software? Well, Friedman was instrumental in the abolition of the military draft. He reasoned that a recruit who volunteers for the military is more likely to want to be there than someone who is drafted. Therefore, they will probably do a better job, die less frequently and re-enlist (thus preventing the loss of experience).

I think the same rules apply to open source development. The contributors to OpenNMS work on the project because they want to. Most of what they work on are things that they are interested in doing in the first place, thus they put more energy into it and it turns out better. Many contributors come back and contribute more. Contrast this to a proprietary software company where programmers are told what to write, when to write it and how it should be done. This is not to say that a small proprietary shop can’t produce good work, but one of any size is bound to be less effective that a large and active open source community.

But the best market analogy is that a lot of the features that are being added to OpenNMS are at the request of the actual end-users. Things get added that are deemed necessary – by the market, and not by a bunch of people sitting around a big desk in some office. Thus OpenNMS has better market information, better feedback, and it evolves faster than a proprietary solution can change.

Milton Friedman was one of the first people to show that capitalism and social good are not mutually exclusive, and for that I salute him.