Okay, just a few more LinuxWorld Expo pics.

The KDE Gang

Benjamin Meyer, who along with Ben Reed, is maintaining a KDE port to OS X.

The Digium Gang, responsible for the Asterisk open-source PBX solution.

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The Thursday afternoon keynote was given by Ross Mauri of IBM. IBM has become a large supporter of Linux and open-source. Of course, this is because IBM has moved away from software sales and is focused mainly on services and hardware now (grin).

There used to be a saying that no one got fired by buying from IBM, so to see this company embracing Linux is encouraging. Ross pointed out that the first LWE he attended was dominated by geeks with few (he said four) business customers. This one is very commercial, with names like Oracle, IBM, Novell, Intel and others in attendance.

I also attended a talk by Maria Winslow who has been doing some serious work on the financial benefits moving to open source. OpenNMS was mentioned in a case study, so Go Team.

One of the reasons I wanted to come to LWE was the geek factor. I have been a bit disappointed. For example, there were two presentations on LDAP – one an overview of directories and one, supposedly, about implementation. However, the second one repeated the consulting mantra: requirements analysis, gap analysis, technology choice, yadda, yadda.

I don’t agree with that method anymore. I believe in results. So I wanted to see something like “hey, I want to manage the passwords on my multiple servers in LDAP. After ‘apt-get install openldap’ what now?”

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Well, I’ve made it to LinuxWorld. I am staying at a friend’s place in Brooklyn, so I ventured into the NYC subway system for the second time in my life, and the first time unescorted.

Of course the train in front of us immediately broke down, and we sat for about 20 minutes waiting for the problem to get cleared up. But I made it to the Javits Center in plenty of time for the keynote.

Jack Messman, CEO and Chairman of Novell, was the first keynote speaker. Novell, a US$1 billion company has spent over US$250 million in the last year expanding its open-source position, mainly with the purchase of Ximian and SuSE Linux.

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Well, here I am, New York City.

I’m here for LinuxWorld Expo, and while we don’t have an OpenNMS booth, we may in the summer in San Francisco.

I hope to use this week to talk about what I see in the future, both for OpenNMS and open-source in general. So I hope I don’t bore.

First off, 1.1.3. I must apologize again for the delay, but I really want 1.2 to be useful for a long time, and thus we are trying to fix the most annoying bugs, and get the most features.

That said, I’ll put a stake in the ground and say Friday, Feb 6th, for 1.1.3.

Well, I need to grab some sleep. More tomorrow.

Since I consider OpenNMS a global community, I just wanted to post a note expressing my personal hope that the current strife will come to a quick end with minimal loss of life. Unlike many Americans, I have spent time overseas in places like the Middle East and Asia, and I found the people there to be very friendly and kind.

I had other things to say, but I got this in an e-mail from SourceForge today, and it seems to express them better than I could:

Finally, in this time of global political uncertainty, it is good to be
reminded that Open Source software has no boundaries. The work you do
on your Open Source project benefits countless individuals and nations
in every corner of the globe. Regardless of location, faith, or race,
developers are collaborating together to create software that will not
only benefit themselves, but all of humanity. At a time when it’s hard
to see something positive in the news, remember in our own way, the
Open Source community is making a difference.

Well, Ben Reed has been on to me for some time now to start a web log about OpenNMS. Since I spend so much of my life working on that product, I figured it would be better to start a web log about my experiences with building a company around open-source and, of course, OpenNMS.

So, welcome to my adventures in open source. I really do believe in the open source model, but you may notice that I am not an open source bigot. I am using Movable Type as my blog editor, and I am writing this on a Mac Powerbook running OSX. The right tool for the right job.

So, if I don’t believe that open source is the “be all” and “end all”, why do I bust my hump working on OpenNMS? Because in this case, open source works. Network management is hard, difficult to the point that you can’t really utilize most software “out of the box”. So what you need instead is a tool, a tool that is powerful enough to be useful in many different situations.

But OpenNMS is and will always be growing, so check back here to see my thoughts on how we are doing, and feel free to add your own.