A few weeks ago I was asked by Chris DiBona to participate in a podcast that he and Leo Laporte put together called “FLOSS“. I didn’t know much about it but when I went to the site I was pretty flabbergasted to be included in such company.

I mean Jeremy Allison (samba), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP), Guido van Rossum (python) and company are pretty much deities in the open source pantheon and I’m just a cheerleader. Not even one of those small deities like “goddess of the hearth” or “god of months without an ‘r'”, more like a sprite or gnome or whatever you would call those little nameless things who kind of get to meet the gods occasionally.

I pretty much started off the conversation (after Leo politely told me how to adjust the modulation on my headset mic) claiming they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel chatting with me, but they were really cool about it and made me feel welcome. Those who know me can also imagine that once we got rolling on OpenNMS it is a little hard to shut me up.

I was pleased to see that our chat ran several minutes longer than most, but since I haven’t listened to it I can’t tell if it was good or not. I hate the sound of my voice (the voice in my head is much more suave and refined than the one I hear on tape) and I’m just afraid that I will come across as the biggest dweeb on the planet. However, the one post on the site so far seems positive and several of my friends tell me it was good. Then again, my friends lie a lot.

Anyway, check it out if you are so inclined and let me know what you think (and please consider dropping Leo a few shekels by supporting TWiT). The fact that Chris and Leo were willing to talk to me at all makes me even more determined to make OpenNMS worthy of such company.

I am in Chicago this week working with a client on 1.3.0. I really like Chicago (go Sox), and we actually have more OpenNMS clients in this city (5) than in any other place. We’ve been working with the new SNMPv3 feature and so far it’s been a hit.

When traveling I often find myself alone for dinner, so it’s “Table for one” time once again. I usually bring a book and this trip I’m reading one called ”Biodiesel Power” by a friend of mine named Lyle Estill. I’m sure it will be a big success, since right there on the first page of the Acknowledgments is yours truly. It changes the whole tone of the book for the better. Really. (grin)

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I’ve just returned from an exciting and vibrant show at LinuxWorld Expo UK to be plunged back into the 80 hour weeks with OpenNMS that make up my normal life. It was great to see so many people at the OpenNMS booth and so many people starting to see the advantages of open source software.

However, it does seem that some people are giving up on the open source model. Nessus announced that they were closing its source due to competitors using it. I don’t have that problem – heck I view people using OpenNMS as an endorsement of its worthiness.

I blogged about Cittio’s WatchTower a couple of weeks ago. It was pointed out to me that some features of WatchTower resembled OpenNMS, and so I started to investigate it. I set up a call with Jamie Lerner, the CEO/President of Cittio, and I just got off the phone with him.

Let me say from the start that Jamie comes across as a nice guy. He was very upfront, didn’t try to dodge any of my questions, and seemed very sincere about insuring that Cittio maintained a good relationship with the communities of the open-source projects they used.

OpenNMS is a part of WatchTower, but they are using a version from mid 2003 (something like 1.1.0). They haven’t modified any of the code. They use various daemons in OpenNMS to generate both information in the database and RRD files, and their other processes access that data outside of OpenNMS.

But, you might ask, their Orbital Architecturefeature where they can make changes to the configuration files without restarting implies they modified the code. From what Jamie tells me, they ”do” restart the OpenNMS daemons they use when a change is made, just not the WatchTower application itself.

They are starting to run into some of the scalability issues that plagued us back then, and they would like to get involved in addressing the data collection issues we run into on very large networks. I first advised them to check out a later version of OpenNMS (those of you who have been around for a couple of years know that we’ve improved by orders of magnitude) and then decide in what areas they would like to contribute, and we’ll set them up with a branch on Sourceforge.

The last topic of discussion was credit. The OpenNMS code is a volunteer effort, and just as I always try to acknowledge contributions in the CHANGELOG, it would be nice to see some sort of “we use OpenNMS” blurb with respect to WatchTower. I brought up with Jamie a similar issue with The Gimp on OS X by the fink project. People who work on open-source code like to have that work acknowledged. Jamie promised me that they would address that as well.

All in all it was a good call. There is room in this world for commercial and open source to play together. My goal is for OpenNMS to be the default management platform for everyone, and that means that the applications that use that platform will span the gamut of licensing models (Ciscoworks anyone? Bueller? Bueller?).

OpenNMS itself, however, will always be free as in freedom. Everyday I see more and more evidence that open source works, which is why I am disheartened by the decisions of folks like Nessus. They state that they don’t get many contributions from the community. That’s a shame – and something I hope to avoid. By inviting companies like Cittio to get involved, we can all benefit.

Well, that was a hectic week. Luckily we are nothing but traditional here in OpenNMS land, and Friday means barbecue for lunch and beer before we go home.

We have three people confirmed for Dev-Jam 2005: Mike Huot, DJ Gregor and Bill Ayres will all be making the trip out, and Ben Reed says he’s coming if we go to his Halloween Party (I’ve only made one of his parties in the last 4 years or so). We’re hoping for more – perhaps some of the folks from Europe can make the trip considering the Euro is strong against the dollar.

We also have 1358 registered wiki members. w00t!

Our “Q Friday” lunches have become quite popular, and in the past five weeks we’ve had four “guest” lunches where folks have come out to Pittsboro to join us on our weekly trip to the Temple of ‘cue. It’s an open invitation – just drop me a note to let me know you’re coming.

Today’s guests were Mark Hinkel and Greg and Paul from Emu Software. Emu makes a commercial configuration management tool using Java, Tomcat and Postgresql, and with our pending move to AJAX (as part of Dev-Jam) we hope to integrate our applications together. It was a great lunch, and meeting people like these guys is one of the reasons I love my job.

Next week I’m in Texas for awhile (the lower, dryer part) and then it’s off to the UK for LinuxWorld Expo. Hope to see some of you there.

I love my job. I have never been happier than I am working on OpenNMS, and I’m proud of the application as well as the community that supports it.

People often ask me about open-source and how it will succeed, and I like to point to the work of the economist John Nash (subject of the movie ”A Beautiful Mind”) on cooperation. Working together people can benefit more than working apart.

But there is always a “dark side” to open source. We’ve been unfortunate enough to be touched by it twice recently. Since I hadn’t updated the blog in awhile, I thought I’d talk about it today.

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When I was at LinuxWorld Expo, I was able to meet Mitch Pirtle of the Mambo development team (they won the award for Best Open Source Solution) and I have been carrying on an e-mail correspondence with Brian Teeman, another Mambo developer and our host at the .org Village at Linuxworld UK. So I felt a more personal connection than normal when the Mambo developers posted a letter to the community.

From what I can understand, Mambo was started by a company called Miro. It managed to attract a large number of developers (larger than our own OGP) who worked outside of Miro, and those developers helped make the Mambo product what it is today. Now there has been a split between the non-Miro Mambo contributors and Miro.

I tried to find a history of Mambo, but the only link I came across via Google on mamboserver.com resulted in “The page you are trying to access does not exist.” Gotta love the revisionist history that is the web.

From what I can tell, Miro wants to retain tight control over the software known as Mambo. It is their trademark and they own the copyright. It also seems that they are moving to a more commercial revenue model, as evidenced by a recent name change.

This split has caused a lot of tension, and I empathize with the volunteers who gave up a lot of time and effort to support the application, and now at the very least seem to be marginalized and at the most, exploited.

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how this may impact OpenNMS.

I strive very hard to keep the .org and .com aspects of OpenNMS separate. Except for a small graphic on the right of the web page, we try not to tout that there is a small commercial institution behind the project. The business of the OpenNMS Group is to supply services and support – i.e. we sell time – and not to provide software.

It appears that Miro uses or wants to use the same dual-license scheme that MySQL uses. Since the GPL is based on copyright law, it is possible for a copyright holder to publish the same material under two different licenses. In other words, there can be a GPL’d “free as in freedom” version and a commercial “you pay us for it” version. Thus commercial software products can imbed MySQL, as long as they pay a fee.

This seems to work fine for MySQL, and the database is a nice one. Plus there is lots of good documentation and features that I am certain the commercial side of MySQL helped pay for.

But I have some reservations with the model. It tends to drive away contribution, as any contribution that gets included in MySQL comes with the caveat that MySQL gets the copyright.

With network management, the success of OpenNMS lies in the willingness of the community to add to it, to discuss the best ways for OpenNMS to work, and to tell the development community what’s most important. If the OpenNMS application was commercialized, I would bet that the enthusiasm to contribute would wane. It would make OpenNMS less of a solution than it could be.

It also helps that no one company owns the OpenNMS copyright. Up until version 1.0.0, the copyright was held by Oculan. Almost all of the considerable changes made in the last three years are copyright the OpenNMS Group. And the copyright only exists to keep the program under the GPL (we have no requirement that features added by other parties give up their copyright, as long as they are GPL or LGPL). There is no danger that OpenNMS will be published under a separate commercial license.

I also personally believe in the “spirit” of open source. People are always suspicious of “free” things, and I am constantly confronted by people who claim you cannot be successful if you don’t sell your software. They’ll say “open-source won’t be recognized until there is an open-source billionaire”. I always reply that there already is one: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.

The critics always sputter “but he doesn’t sell software”. Exactly. Open-source isn’t about selling software, but it’s about using the best tool for the job, and if Bezos had to buy Windows or Solaris licenses he would not be able to survive on his tiny margins. He would not exist without open-source, and thus I feel justified in calling him an open-source billionaire.

My own thoughts on the open-source community often center around a scene from “A Beautiful Mind”. This movie about the economist John Nash demonstrates some of his theories on cooperation. In the scene I always remember, several young men want to approach several attractive young women in a bar. Nash points out that by working together, they can all be better off than working alone (for details, rent the movie).

That’s the heart of my feelings toward OpenNMS. By having an open and cooperative community, we can all be better off. That’s why all software development done for hire by The OpenNMS Group is done on the Sourceforge CVS. We charge our customers a price they think is fair, and the community as a whole gets to benefit.

I think we are about to witness an interesting experiment with Mambo. Since Miro owns the Mambo trademark, the software that those 20+ developers create will have to be called something else, and six months to a year from now I will be curious as to who has the better product.

My money’s on open-source.

Author Cory Doctorow is unusual in many ways, but most notably in that he publishes his work under the Creative Commons license, which is much looser than the normal “This work cannot be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved” form of copyright.

I saw a somewhat favorable review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Wired Magazine and was interested in reading it. Then I saw that he had made it freely available for download on his website, and he even encourages people to port it to new devices (such as a Palm Pilot, etc.)

I have a huge backlog of reading to do, so I’m not sure when I’ll get around to reading his novel (probably on the plane to LinuxWorld Expo in August), but I did read the first couple of pages where he answers the questions “Why do I do this?”.

We often get the same questions concerning OpenNMS: why open-source? So I thought I’d try to answer the question in a similar way, with Short Term, Long Term and Medium Term goals.
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Today has been a busy one. It’s seems lately I sit at the keyboard and start typing and I don’t stop until it gets dark outside.

Not much OpenNMS news today. We got on the IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) and discussed 1.3. We are going to try and merge a number of branches in preparation for a 1.3.0 release. The tests pass, so cross your fingers.

A friend of mine, Lyle Estill was mentioned on Doc Searles’ weblog. You might also wanna go buy his new book if you are in to that sort of thing.

Okay. I love Netflix.

There, I said it.

For those of you reading this outside the US, or who aren’t familiar, Netflix is a new way of renting movies. For US$20 a month, you sign up on-line and pick as many movies on DVD that you would like to see. They then send you three, and you can keep them as long as you like. Watch them, stick them back into the postage-paid envelope, and get three more. Since I live out in the country, I have no access to cable. I don’t watch enough television (too much time spent on OpenNMS) to warrant a satellite subscription, and if I did it would still be considerably more than US$20 a month. With the new Netflix hub an hour away in Greensboro, I get two day turn-around on my movies, which is faster than I can watch them.

What does this have to do with OpenNMS?

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