Community

Update on Nethinks MONET and OpenNMS

Posted on by tarus

As I wrote a couple of days ago, we were told about a product in Germany that looked heavily based on OpenNMS, although no acknowledgement was given in the article. Since a number of people involved with OpenNMS are German, we set about investigating, and I’m happy to report that it doesn’t appear that there is any license violation going on here.

Alex Finger, one of the OGP, contacted the company and talked with Ronny Trommer of Nethinks. I received this note from Herr Trommer today:

We sell no licenses. We have created a distribution of Open-Source Tools. One part of them is the MONET-SNM-module which uses OpenNMS. The MONET-Ticket module uses OTRS and the MONET-Reporting module uses JasperServer from JasperForge.

All our changes are completely GPL. We have build a NagVis-adaption to OpenNMS cause some customers want it. Additionaly i have created a JasperServer-Interface to get a better Report-Management with JasperServer. This is fully documented incl. source on http://www.opennms.org/index.php/JasperServer_Integration. The source is complete GPL and everybody can use it. If someone interested on the NagVis-Adapter we will give full source. We have posted it on the mailinglist.

I have instructed our webmaster to clearify the situation with a new product-description like here:

http://www.nethinks.com/sub/produkte/

Our job is to do projects in network management, service desks and reporting for our customers.

All our installations on customers contains the following copyright

Distributed by NETHINKS GmbH – OpenNMS Copyright © 2002-2008 The OpenNMS Group, Inc. OpenNMS® is a registered trademark of The OpenNMS Group, Inc.

The about-page is not changed.

All our customers know, they use OpenNMS in MONET-SNM. They had never paid a buck for a license.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the definition of “open source”, and especially its use and commercialization. It is exactly companies like Nethinks that we want using OpenNMS, and they have done an excellent job of contributing back to the community. While we have completed an OTRS integration directly in to OpenNMS, I plan to work to see that this JasperServer work gets integrated as well (giving Nethinks full credit, of course).

When I wrote the original article I tried to err on the side that Nethinks was indeed abiding by the license, and it is great to not only find out that they are but they have gone a bit beyond the required with their website changes and contributions.

Thanks to Alex and Ronny for getting this straightened out.

OpenNMS vs. Nethinks MONET 2.0

Posted on by tarus

[UPDATE: It appears that Nethinks is using OpenNMS well within the boundaries of the license]

Today, Klaus Thielking-Riechert, one of our community members, sent me a link to an interesting story on the Network Computing (Germany) website.

It was on a product called MONET 2.0 by Nethinks GmbH. Their product looks really good. I especially like the user interface. It looks very familiar. For example, here is their front page:


(image taken from here)

and here’s one from OpenNMS:

The article talks about the device page as well, check it out:


(image taken from here)

and here’s one from OpenNMS:

Look familiar?

(sigh)

Now, I’m no lawyer and I don’t read German very well, so I’m not quite sure that they are in violation of any license. If they are just supplying this application over the web to their clients, then I don’t believe that violates the GPL.

However, they have including a map:


(image taken from here)

which means they have changed the code, so if they are selling this application then there is a probable GPL violation.

Look, we produce OpenNMS in the hopes that someone finds it useful. The only thing we ask is for a little recognition. If you like it, tell a friend. Send us a postcard. But please acknowledge the work of the community, especially if you rebadge it and, in the case of Nethinks, put your copyright on it. I may not be required but it is the right thing to do.

If Nethinks is trying to commercialize the software in violation of the license, then we will take whatever steps are necessary to correct it. In any case they are presenting a lot of our work as their own, and that’s just wrong.

Greed (Rant)

Posted on by tarus

I like money. Money buys a certain amount of security, and security buys freedom.

But Gordon Gekko was wrong: greed is not good. Trying to make money for money’s sake is usually the wrong thing to do. Build a product, help your customers, and take care of your employees and the money will come. Shortcuts often lead to heartache.

Take today for example. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had the lowest single point drop in its history, due to the fact that a bunch of people got greedy and for once Congress decided not to write a blank check. And for those of you who think the sky is going to fall if something isn’t done right now, I agree with these guys.

But on to other news that’s more directly related to open source, it looks like Ringside Networks is closing shop.

I really hate it when things like this happen. Now, I’m not worried about Bob Bickel. I’ve met him a couple of times and he’s pretty smart so he’ll be fine. But my guess is that he worked with a lot of cool, smart people who haven’t quite had his level of success. They probably put a lot into their product and now, due to some bad decisions, it seems to be over.

Bob blames it on bad luck (well, the lack of good luck which is the same thing). It sounds a lot like the problems with the current financial markets – ooops, it was just bad luck that the sub-prime mortgages we made to people who couldn’t pay, well, didn’t get paid.

I’m being a bit cruel and I’m definitely oversimplifying, but if you read his description of the failure from my point of view, it does seem a bit like sour grapes.

Although he doesn’t name them, it appears that while Ringside Networks was trying to raise money from VCs, they were approached by Google who wanted to acquire them. He writes “we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact.”

I read that as “w00t! We can cash out early!”.

When Google changed their minds and the acquisition didn’t happen, Bob said they were unable to get any money since “we kind of burned the VCs”.

Bah. You don’t “burn” VCs. VCs are soulless, pure businessmen. The best are unemotional. “You don’t want our money? Fine. See ya”. They could care less about not being able to fund Ringside. If their technology was so good, “the very best VC firms” would have been fighting to fund them.

What they did care about was that Google decided to pass on Ringside. Google is a company known for integrating some of the best technology out there as well as incubating new, small companies, so if Google didn’t want your product, there must have been a reason.

Bob doesn’t tend to work with crap, so my guess is that Ringside probably had a pretty good project going, but that greed got in the way. Bad decisions were made. It wasn’t luck. For instance, they could have taken the best term sheet offer they could and then sold to Google at a later date, but that would have diluted the company considerably. It might have made them less appealing (but then the deal never happened anyway) but they would still be around.

It is real easy for me to sit back and armchair quarterback this story, and like many things I probably have it wrong, but since this purpose of this blog is to provide a reference for others who might want to start an open source business there is one other thing I want to point out.

Bob says, “our development had stalled because of our desires to build stuff aligned with our new direction in the non-evil company.”

Back in the early part of 2007 we were approached by a company that wanted to acquire our company. We were pretty excited, but as things moved along we began to have doubts. I have a very strong idea of what an “open source” company should be, and unfortunately that doesn’t always agree with the guys on Sand Hill Road. Walking away from that deal was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I think one of the best.

During this process OpenNMS development damn near stopped. Thank goodness the community was able to step up and keep things going, because we were worthless. It is very easy to get caught up in the process and to let drop the things that made you attractive in the first place.

So that’s today’s small nugget of wisdom. Stay focused on your product, focused on your customers and focused on your team – no matter what – and you’ll make your own luck.

[Note: Ben had a lot to do with some of the thoughts behind this post]

2008 Australia – Old Friends

Posted on by tarus

For the first year I maintained OpenNMS, I worked out of my house. It took a little adjusting, mainly to the lack of human contact. My wife has a career of her own and thus I was home alone for most of the day. I related to the rest of the world through IRC and mailing lists.

I’m not sure how I made it through that first year. Luckily, the nascent OpenNMS community was there to help, and I had my friends at the Triangle Linux Users Group (TriLUG) as well.

Unless you’ve experienced this, it is hard to describe. I was once arguing with the CEO of another open source project (one with the “hybrid” business model of community [open] vs. enterprise [closed] versions) who viewed the code his company produced as a gift to the community, and not really community developed. He was proposing some changes to what would be in the open vs. closed versions of his software and I asked him what his community would think of it. He replied “if the f***ers, don’t like it, f*** ’em.”

This really pissed me off. I replied that it was much different with OpenNMS, because when it was just me, it was those “f***ers” who kept me and the project going when there was nobody else. That is part of the reason I am so adamant about keeping OpenNMS open.

Anyway, my main interaction with large number of humans was the monthly TriLUG meeting. I’d get there early, chat, stay for the presentation and pizza, and once we got kicked out of the room, stand in the parking lot chatting for another hour or two.

One of the key organizers of TriLUG in those days was Jeremy Portzer. Right about the time OpenNMS started taking off he took a job with Blackboard in Washington, DC, and about 18 months ago he transferred to the Sydney office. Since I was down here we decided to meet for dinner last night.

It was nice. I got to meet the Blackboard team in Sydney (there are other employees spread across the country but most work from home) as well as spend some time downtown. I took the ferry from Parramatta to Circular Quay and then walked to the high rise building where the office is to meet Jeremy. We then got some beer a local pub (I tend to drink VB when I’m here) and then had a great meal at a restaurant on The Rocks. While you can’t really see it in the picture above, this was what we were looking at as we ate.

Jeremy also hooked me up with a SIM card so that the phone that Alex gave me would work here. We stopped by his apartment to get it on the way to the train station. He has a really nice apartment, small but with a great view, and a large balcony that overlooks Central station from 12 stories up.

I hoping to meet other folks while I’m here. I’m going to be in North Sydney on the 20th and I want to see about getting a group of people together for beer and conversation. If you are local and want to help me organize it, please drop me a note. I’m thinking we can meet somewhere central, perhaps back at Circular Quay. I’m open to suggestions. That, and more beer, of course.

Measuring Open Source Success: Become Superfluous

Posted on by tarus

This has probably been the most successful developer’s conference we’ve ever had. The main reason is that the core community is becoming mature with respect to the code.

Think about it. Most of the highly successful open source projects you have heard of are code-centric, i.e. they tend to be used by programmers or people with a strong programming background.

OpenNMS is different. The main users of the product are network and systems administrators. Sure, they’re used to writing “glue” code and scripts, but they usually don’t have any formal training in programming.

For the last several years we’ve been holding these conferences to help convert those decades of management knowledge into high quality code. Matt (who does have a tremendous amount of programming knowledge) has been a a great mentor and as this conference shows we’ve come along way.

When I took over maintaining OpenNMS in 2002, it was just me. I was pretty much responsible for everything, and so I pretty much knew all there was to know about OpenNMS. If a bug got fixed, I fixed it. If a question got answered, I answered it. I did as much as I could, and at times it was scary and it was always overwhelming.



Back Row: Alex, me, Alan, Craig G., Craig M., Jeff, Matt, Mike, Alejandro
Front Row: Johan, DJ, Walt, Jonathan, Rob, Dave, Bill, Ben
(photo by Alex)

Not anymore. The project is growing so fast it is amazing. Today Mike Huot pointed out that even with the majority of the people involved with the project here in Atlanta, the mailing list is pretty much maintaining itself. People are coming up with features, writing code, and fixing things without any interaction with me.

I have become superfluous.

So many open source projects revolve around a single person or a very small group. For whatever reason they never seem to let go. Others only exist because some corporation controls them and the majority of the work is done by the employees of that company. I’ve always found that such organizations quickly become isolated from the needs of the end users and their efforts start to focus more on what generates press or short term revenue than on solving real-world problems. OpenNMS is special in that, for some strange reason, we’ve created something with a life of its own; a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

This frees me up to tell stories and write silly blog posts and to play with an OpenNMS that gets better every day. I get to go out and solve management problems using a powerful tool purpose-built for the job. We must be doing something right, because when a long time customer called me today to schedule our annual week of training, I looked at my calendar and replied “December”.

So let me say “thanks” to everyone involved with OpenNMS. Let’s go do great things.

Dev-Jam, News, OUCH and echo

Posted on by tarus

Well, things have been a bit crazy around here getting ready for Dev-Jam.

This will be our fourth developer’s conference and it is one of my favorite times of the year. This year we are moving to Georgia Tech (a change from UMN) and I can’t say I’m looking forward to being in Atlanta in high summer, but the rooms we’re using have air conditioning and bandwidth so what more could we want.

We also have people from five countries in attendance. In addition to the USA, we have two guys from the UK, one from Venezuela, one from New Zealand and Alex – who is German, yet works in Switzerland and lives in France – I’ll let you choose which country we should count for him.

Almost all of the OGP was able to make it, so it should be a productive week. Stay tuned for updates from the conference starting this weekend.

Last Thursday I was invited to Michael Coté and John Willis’s weekly podcast. John was a bit late coming to the party, so Michael invited a friend of his, Matt Ray of Zenoss, to join us. I got to talk about OpenNMS (imagine that) as well as my current distaste for the overexposure of the term “cloud computing“.

When John joined the call he tossed OpenNMS a bone by bringing up software licensing. One place where OpenNMS differs greatly from other “commercial open source” companies is that while support and services are available, the software is 100% free and open. Matt’s company publishes some of its code under the GPL (which Matt quickly pointed out) but all of their “non-community” code has a proprietary license.

Matt seems like a nice guy, so I didn’t rise to the bait, plus he had a cold. Most “commercial open source” companies have a business plan that relies heavily (if not entirely) on software licensing revenues. Since it is difficult to sell open source software more than once, software developed for this model can’t be free and open. Since a smart business wants to maximize profit, these business should be finding ways to drive people from the “open” solution to the proprietary one. Most importantly, a smart business will make decisions concerning their “open” solutions to maximize the migration to proprietary software.

This isn’t a bad model, or even a wrong one. I just grouse at using “open source” in any fashion to describe it.

Matt did give us a compliment by mentioning that the new Zenoss Masters program is modeled on the OGP. Building community is fun and we wish them the best of luck with that.

The biggest comments so far on the podcast have been about the ability of OpenNMS to replace portions of Micromuse (now IBM) Netcool. I’ve always been a big fan of Netcool, and I worked with Micromuse even before they had an office in the US. But the price was always astronomical, so a couple of years ago we decided to implement some of the functionality of Netcool into OpenNMS. We have a number of clients who have replaced Netcool, but we are currently working with a large telco in Italy that will be our biggest challenge to see if we can take a very large Netcool install and replace it. David is spending several weeks a month in Italy with Antonio for the rest of the year to implement some of the migration. It’s hard work, but fun.

Both John Willis and Doug McClure posted about it on their blogs, so I hope to be able to send them some actual numbers in the near future.

Hrm, lessee, what else is going on …

OSCON is this week. I went last year, but with Dev-Jam next week I just couldn’t justify going this year. Plus, it is really more of a coders show and I’m not a coder.

LinuxWorld is the week after Dev-Jam. They have been kind enough to give us a booth for a couple of years, but the show has become too much “commercial open source” for my tastes, so we didn’t ask for one this year. Jeff is going there to work in the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) booth. While we’re not a member of the OSA, OpenNMS integrates with both Hyperic and Concursive, which are members, so we’ve been asked to demonstrate this interoperability. David decided to call this integration the “OUCH” stack (grin). It stands for OpenNMS, Ubuntu, Concursive and Hyperic. If you’re going to the show be sure to say “hi” to Jeff.

Finally, I want to send a “shout out” to Eric Bradford at echo. He sent us a card this week for the Fabulous, Amazing, and Incredible Wall of Cards. I’ve included it below, as it made my day.

"Sustainable, Open Source Software and All"

Posted on by tarus

In an earlier post I mentioned Lyle Estill’s book “Small is Possible“. It is the followup to “Biodiesel Power” and focuses on the efforts of a small community in North Carolina as it tries to “feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself and govern itself.”

People are probably tired of me going on and on about the community being the heart of open source. I know I sound like a broken record, but with the current bastardization of the term “open source” by commercial software companies I feel compelled to point out that you don’t get the benefits attributed to open source software unless you have an empowered community. I saw a press release from one such company the other day that was going to “unveil” its latest software release at Red Hat Summit. Unveil open source software? You wanna see the latest OpenNMS, check it out of subversion and build it. You don’t have to wait for someone to allow you to do it. There is nothing hidden, nothing to “unveil”.

The community has been key to OpenNMS. This year is our fourth Dev-Jam developers conference. We (the .com side of things) spend a lot of money on Dev-Jam, but we get every cent back in the form of a better OpenNMS. It is the one time of year where the core of the community gets together, face to face, to decide on the future direction of OpenNMS. It isn’t dictated by the commercial side of the business, and there are many more people in attendance than are employed by the OpenNMS Group. The OpenNMS Group is strictly a services company, while the software is owned by the community at large.

[Note: we’re still looking for Dev-Jam sponsors (grin)]

I am often surprised at how well this model translates to other new endeavors, such as Lyle’s biodiesel operation. It started out as an experiment in a blender, grew to form a coop, and then became a commercial enterprise. Now that he is producing over a million gallons a year, one would assume that he’d just want to build a bigger plant. No, he’d rather see others replicate what he is doing, and he and his team will be glad to help you do it. In much the same way that I sell expertise with OpenNMS, Piedmont Biofuels will sell you their expertise to get your biofuel operation underway. Lyle has created a “reference implementation” of a biodiesel plant, just as we are trying to create a reference implementation of a management framework that is completely open source.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the parallels. Michael Tiemann read Lyle’s book and had some cool comments on his blog. I’ve never met Michael but we seem to share the same philosophy when it comes to open source. Together, it *is* possible to build powerful and sustainable solutions, both within software and within our lives and communities.

[Note: I’m storing a bunch of “Small Is Possible” books for Lyle in a spare office so he gave me a box. All new support contracts and renewals will get a copy. While supplies last.]

Fedora, Java and that Other Barbecue

Posted on by tarus

Since this is the first week of June, I’ve started to get excited about the upcoming Dev-Jam at the end of July. We are hoping to raise enough sponsorships to be able to fly in our Google Summer of Code students, so I’ve been beating the bushes for sponsors. Since Red Hat is down the street, I decided to ask around to see if I could meet their community person.

I’m an unabashed fan of Red Hat. Now I know the company has some detractors, and they have some valid points, but all in all Red Hat is a true open source success story. They have done well financially, and despite having to deal with the whims of Wall Street they have kept true to the ideals of free and open source software. Red Hat employees contribute an enormous amount of time to open source projects, and almost all of the software they create is available without a fee (otherwise CentOS could not exist).

Most importantly, Red Hat has remained independent. With a market cap of over US$4 billion, I would challenge anyone to name a more successful open source business.


Red Hat Stock Price Since 2001

So why doesn’t Red Hat get more respect? One reason is that they are not headquartered in Silicon Valley. The Valley is a funny place. There are some very clever people there, but sometimes I wonder if that cleverness gets in the way of getting things done. Red Hat gets things done.

One of the most intelligent moves Red Hat made was the creation of the Fedora Project. The open source mantra of “release early, release often” doesn’t work well at the enterprise level, so how can one both embrace open source and yet provide the stability required in mission critical applications? By creating and supporting the free software playground known as Fedora, Red Hat not only stimulates the creation of the next version of Red Hat Linux, there is an obvious and distinct separation between the “commercial” product and the “community” project.

I introduced myself to Greg Dekoenigsburg (known as gdk) via e-mail. As the Community Development Manager for Red Hat, I thought he may be able to help us out with Dev-Jam, and as we exchanged messages it became clear that here was a guy who “got it” when it came to open source.

At OpenNMS we’ve been wanting to get more involved with our friends down the road at Centennial Campus, but since OpenNMS is a Java application, that hasn’t been easy since Java was non-free. OpenJDK changes that. Now that Java is free, Fedora is eager to bring enterprise-grade Java applications into the distro, and part of that will be figuring out how to package it. Like many other Java projects, we just bundle all of the jars we need in with our app and drop it in /opt. Since I work with one of the best software packagers on the planet, Ben Reed, I knew his input would be invaluable and we all decided to meet for lunch.


Michael, gdk, Ben and me at Crazy Fire

It was a lot of fun. gdk brought along Michael DeHaan and the four of us talked open source, geek stuff and ate Mongolian barbecue for a couple of hours. It was nice to deal with people who understood the value of open source communities while still running a business around it. Or as Michael put it in an e-mail to me afterward “It was very nice to meet some other folks that are following the real open source way of doing things.”

There is still a lot of work to be done, and you can get involved. gdk has decided on an appropriate mailing list, and you can also join the #fedora-java channel at irc.freenode.net.

And don’t forget to consider sponsoring Dev-Jam, too. (grin)

Europe 2008: Paris to London

Posted on by tarus

Because of the train strike I rebooked our travel from the train to an airplane from Nice to Paris, and then we took a bus into the city. It dropped us off near the Arc de Triomphe.


Me and the Arc de Triomphe

A friend of mine has a nice flat in Paris in a great location, so we decided to stay there instead of another hotel. It’s really refreshing to be in something that is more like a home than a hotel room, and we were even able to do some laundry. If you want to live like me, you can rent the same place if you are ever in Paris. Be sure to use the “friends and family” rate and say you know me from OpenNMS.

Today we woke up and took the Metro to La Défense, one of the main business centers in Paris.


Victor Hugo Metro stop

As we were waiting for the client to come and meet us in the lobby, I was looking through their annual report. They had revenues of 50 billion euros last year.

Wow.

When we first started this OpenNMS thing, we thought that the people who would want to use our software would be smaller companies that couldn’t afford OpenView or Tivoli. It turns out it is the large companies that can’t afford them, and they are really drawn to the aspect of zero software licenses as well as the flexible framework that OpenNMS provides.

We’ve done work in France in the past, but this project will definitely increase our involvement in that country, and we hope to have some French-centric resources available soon.

After a nice lunch we returned to the apartment to do some e-mail before heading back on the Metro to Gare du Nord, one of the main train stations (and yes, every time I was on the subway Berlin’s “The Metro” was going through my head). From Gare du Nord we took the Eurostar train to London.


David looking out at the land speeding by.

This train will do 300 km/hour (about 186 mph) and the French landscape just flew by. We were going so fast that the longest trains we passed coming the other way were there and gone in less than 3 seconds. Tunnels bothered me, because I would feel some uncomfortable pressure in my ears every time we went through one due to air compression.

That part was pretty fun, but it took us 2.5 hours from arriving in London to make it to the hotel near Heathrow. I hate Heathrow, and I wish American would go back to Gatwick.

But that’s not gonna happen.

So tomorrow it’s back to the USA. I’ll post a little more over the holiday weekend. Have a great one.

Europe 2008: Yeah, But We're *Huge* in Sweden

Posted on by tarus

For the end of the first day of TMW, Nokia Siemens hosted a “networking event” at a medieval castle situated up on the hills that surround Nice.

Unfortunately, they didn’t count on road construction so it was taking the buses over an hour to get there from the convention center. While Craig and I were waiting in line, we had a pretty amazing conversation that went something like this:

Stranger: Excuse me, where did you get that shirt (pointing to Craig’s OpenNMS shirt)

Craig: Oh, I work with the OpenNMS project.

Me: I have one too.

Stranger: Oh wow, I read your blog!

Me: What?

Stranger: I read your blog on OpenNMS.

Me: I don’t believe you.

Stranger: Then let me ask “How are you feeling today?”

Me: Wow.

Seriously, if I thought people actually read this thing I might put a little more effort into it. I don’t really care about things like “hits” and “downloads” as a measure of success, so I really haven’t checked to see if anyone reads it. Perhaps I should, and maybe I should be a little more “politically correct” while I’m at it, too.

Nah. (grin)


Me and Carl doing da gangsta OpenNMS sign, yo

The stranger’s name was Carl, and he and his friend Jan work for a company in Sweden called Tail-f Systems that provides tools for networking device manufacturers to build network management systems to implement the standards required by large enterprises and carriers. The name comes from the Unix command “tail -f” which is a basic method used to monitor logfiles. Cool, huh?

Anyway, we finally made it to the castle and had some decent food surrounded by people in period costumes (shades of the festival in Andilly). There were people on stilts, musicians and “demonstration areas” focused on aspects of medieval life.

I went to one of the demonstration tables and picked up a crossbow. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the instructions and proceeded to shoot the target in the face (I missed the fact that the other targets were apples). After being corrected by the host of the booth (“you shoot my son!”) my next two shots took out apples, and this was captured by one of the cameramen for TelecomTV. Three for three, not bad for a fat geek with bad eyesight.

More on my thoughts about the conference tomorrow.