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2009 Open Source Monitoring Conference

Posted on by tarus

I’m in Nürnberg, Germany this week to speak at a Nagios conference of all things. I was a little disappointed, however, to learn that Nürnberg is no where near the Nürburgring, but so far I am happy I came.

The conference is sold out, and the people I’ve met so far are pretty cool (although I haven’t met all of the 260 in attendance – yet). It’s an interesting ecosystem that has been built up around Nagios, and in many ways it is a microcosm for open source as a whole.

OpenNMS and Nagios are about the same age, but Nagios is much better known, in part because it is written in C and has been available in a number of distributions for years. OpenNMS, being written in Java, has always faced some resistance from users who just don’t like Java, and until the recent advent of the OpenJDK there as been a hurdle to getting something like OpenNMS included in major distributions.

Nagios and OpenNMS share some overlapping features, but from the beginning OpenNMS was aimed at large scale enterprises and was designed with that in mind. Nagios appealed to users at a smaller scale, who liked the ability to add almost any check they could think of to the system very quickly.

But there are more differences. Ethan Galstad, the author of Nagios, always kept pretty close control of the core software. As I write this, OpenNMS has over 40 people with commit access to the code, while Nagios has 9 (up from 3 just a few months ago).

This has caused some tension and has resulted in a number of new projects based on Nagios and at least one outright fork. I can count at least two here at the conference: Opsview and Icinga, and while Ethan used to attend this show he is not here this year.

Maybe it is a coincidence, but last night he announced Nagios XI. This appears to be an “open core” version of his monitoring product, with the old Nagios now being called “Nagios Core OSS”.

As you can imagine, I’m not excited to see more open core software. Groundwork has raised nearly US$30 million and continues to fail with its open core fork of Nagios, and while I consider Ethan much more capable I think it is a bad move. The popularity of Nagios was driven by its community, and it seems obvious that this community is not happy. Driving another wedge between them by splitting development into open and closed versions will not help.

But this is the beauty of open source software. It doesn’t matter what I think. The users get to make the decisions, and Nagios has a great group of users.

Perhaps I can get a few of them interested in OpenNMS.

Mercedes Profitable

Posted on by tarus

A few weeks ago I commented on a Paul Graham post about being “Ramen Profitable” with a reply that at OpenNMS we were “Sushi Profitable“. I also speculated that one day we would be “Mercedes Profitable”.

Well, I wouldn’t say we were there yet, but I did buy a Mercedes.

To be honest, I didn’t pay all that much for it (I bought it from friends) and a C230 isn’t exactly the best example of the marque (as this “Overhead in New York” points out) but I like it.

I can’t see spending a lot of money on a car. I mean, I could pay myself a bonus or get a company car, but we try to plow all of our profits into making the company stronger. One way to do this is to hire more people and, as we are having a good year, I am happy to announce that Jason Aras has decided to join our team.

Jason has been involved with OpenNMS for years now. He is a member of the Order of the Green Polo and can often be found on the IRC channel as “fastjay”. He even came out to Germany, on his own nickel, to present at our first OpenNMS Users Conference. We are very excited to have him on board.

I am often asked how one gets a job working on OpenNMS, and the best way is simply to show us what you can do by getting involved. It may sound a little self-serving, but we’ve been successful by attracting people who really enjoy what they do. It is the second part of our mission statement: Have Fun. If you wouldn’t spend some of your time on the project “for fun” you probably wouldn’t enjoy it as a job, either.

When I was in college the big thing was to co-op. The co-op program let you take time off from school to work, preferably in a field you were hoping to enter, both to earn some money and to see if you liked it. I think open source provides an even better opportunity, as it allows people to really hone their skills, both in things like programming as well as working in a team, through the simple act of showing up. It can provide experience that one can put on a resumé which shows initiative, talent and the ability to work remotely and with others.

And who knows, there might even be a paying job in it.

Eight Years and TriLUG

Posted on by tarus

Last Thursday, 10 September, marked 8 years since I started working on OpenNMS.

Time flies.

That evening I presented a talk called “So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business” at the Triangle Linux Users Group. TriLUG is the only LUG I know of that holds its meetings at Red Hat HQ, which I think is pretty cool. Unfortunately, it is rare that I can make a meeting, but I do try when I have the opportunity.

At each meeting they serve pizza, and since they know that Papa John’s is a big OpenNMS client, they bought from them (plus, they also knew that I was sponsoring it, so that might have had something to do with it, too).

I think the talk went well, and I plan to present it again at this weekend’s Atlanta Linux Fest, although it clocked it at over 90 minutes so I’m going to have to work hard to get it into my allotted 45.

I really enjoyed being back at TriLUG. When OpenNMS was just me, my social life was centered on TriLUG and its IRC channel (sad, I know). In some way they helped keep me going, so I feel a certain amount of fondness for the organization.

Which is why I was surprised to learn that TriLUG has fallen on hard times financially. There used to be enough in the bank to not only cover pizza during months without a sponsor, but to cover the travel expenses of speakers from out of town (which enabled a slew of interesting people to speak at the meetings). When I found out about this I promptly signed us up as a “Gold” sponsor.

I also want to challenge any of the local companies around here who benefit from Linux and open source to help sponsor this organization. It is quite possible the next big open source application could be nurtured by this group.

Huot 2.0

Posted on by tarus

This post is late (been swamped) but I am happy to announce the birth of Sarah Huot, daughter of Mike Huot (OGP).

Sarah was born on August 15th at 6:31PM. She weighed 6lbs 11oz and was 19 Inches long.

The whole OpenNMS team sends out best wishes to Mike and Katie on the birth of their daughter.

More Adventures in Open Source

Posted on by tarus

A friend of mine pointed me to a blogger in the UK who also calls his blog “Adventures in Open Source”. Sweet! The more the merrier. I’ve been promised a pint next time I’m in Liverpool.

The more people who get excited about open source the better. Perhaps it will help prevent more of this:

This is a picture of the monitor in the elevator at the Marriott in downtown San Francisco. It works about half the time.

I see a lot of this in my travels. I have yet to see a public screen displaying something like a Linux kernel panic, however.

2009 OpenSource World – Day 1

Posted on by tarus

Just a reminder that I’m in San Francisco for OpenSource World. Today I’m at Gareth’s FOSS Dev Camp and tomorrow I’m on a panel discussion with Luke Kanies and Michael Coté, moderated by John Mark Walker. If you’re in town, remember the conference is free and I’d love to see you.

If you’re nice to me, I’ll show you the alpha version of the OpenNMS iPhone app that Ben is working on. It’s pretty nifty:

Last night I got to visit with Jason Aras, a member of the Order of the Green Polo.

We went to a restaurant called Firefly that was really good, and it was nice to see “fastjay” again.

One of his coworkers at imeem asked him to thank me. I asked “what for?”

Well, apparently they just switched to OpenNMS from one of the “little four” and for two weekends in a row the on-call guys had zero false positives versus a usual run of about fifty (yes, that’s five-zero). I told him to get them to post their story for the Order of the Blue Polo and I’d send them a nice shirt.

Sourceforge CCA Voting Ends Monday

Posted on by tarus

Just in case you haven’t voted yet, this is one last reminder that the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards voting ends on Monday.

If you like OpenNMS, please be sure to give us some love with a vote (the link should pre-select OpenNMS for “Best Project for the Enterprise and if you don’t have a Sourceforge account you can just enter in an e-mail address).

Remember to vote early and often, and we really appreciate your support.

Plus, if you haven’t had a chance to check out our video, I think it’s worth a look.

All Right Mr. De Mille, I'm Ready for My Close-Up

Posted on by tarus

A couple of weeks ago we found out that OpenNMS has been nominated for a Sourceforge.net Community Choice award as “The Best Tool for the Enterprise”. Many thanks to everyone who nominated us, and I hope you’ll vote for us once more.

As part of the voting process, Ross Turk asked us why we should win this award. I can think of a number of reasons (well, beyond the fame and huge monetary prize), but the main one is that OpenNMS is an example of what can be accomplished with a small but dedicated group of people and the open source development model. OpenNMS can compete with products from companies like IBM and HP, which are orders of magnitude larger, and yet remain 100% free and open software. While there is a commercial company behind the project, it has survived on the business model of “spend less than you earn” and has not accepted outside investment. There is no need for a special, proprietary “enterprise” version of the software – the only OpenNMS version is the enterprise version. There are people out there who believe that it is not possible to create enterprise-grade software under the open source model without some sort of proprietary software “extensions”, but if you understand it and can be true to your community, open source works, which is why I’d like to see us win this award.

Another thing that Ross asked us to do was to make a video showcasing the project. We had a lot of fun with it, and it is now up on YouTube:

As much as I’d like us to win this award, I’m not optimistic. Seriously, the previous winners have included OpenOffice, Firebird and Zimbra – all of which have much more money and many more users than OpenNMS. However, it was worth going through the whole process if just to create this video. I’ve been hoping to capture what it is like to be a part of a vibrant open source community, if just to be able to explain it to others, and this is pretty close to perfection. Many thanks to Jeff and his friend Robbie for pulling an all-nighter to get this done.

At one point in time back in 2002, the “formal” OpenNMS team consisted of just me on my farm in rural North Carolina. Now we have over 20 people in the Order of the Green Polo and over 40 committers. In this video we have people of all shapes and sizes from around the United States as well as four other countries (Venezuela, France, Italy and the UK). For someone like myself with few talents outside of a big mouth, it humbles me to see so much involvement on this project, and it is a honor to be able to work on it with these people.

Check out the video, and for those of you who can’t commit to ten minutes, we’ve also made a one minute trailer, also on YouTube:

If you need a laugh to start your week, at least check that out, and remember to vote.

Leeches

Posted on by tarus

Sorry for not posting in awhile – things have been crazy around the office. At least one of my three readers is a client and if he has an open support issue but sees I have time to write a blog post, he tends to point that out. Let’s just say I’d rather be busy as hell versus the alternative.

The big news in our little world this week is an InfoWorld article on open source “leeches”, a term attributed to Dave Rosenberg to refer to people who use “open source technology but don’t give back to the open source community”.

I’ve talked about “free loaders” in the past so I won’t rehash those comments here. Plus, there are already a number of great comments from folks like Mike Hogan and Jeremy Garcia. My comments will be along somewhat different lines.

When people write, I try to understand their motivation. I write this blog to both chronicle my experiences with open source as well as to promote both OpenNMS and the value of 100% open source software. So, why did InfoWorld publish this article?

A clue is in the subtitle which states “as commercial open source becomes the norm, fewer developers are giving back”. The key word there is “commercial”. The term “commercial open source” is often used by the “fauxpen source” community to describe their business model, which I like to say is along the lines of “Free Food Today, Just $5”. While not to pick at that scab, many of these “commercial” companies were hoping for a lot of community involvement and contribution, and they seem surprised when it doesn’t appear. They then turn around and label people who use their open source software without payment or code contributions as “leeches” and “free riders”.

I have been saying for years now that simply labeling your product as “open source” does not mean that thousands of qualified people will give up nights and weekends to work on it. I think it is even harder to get those people to contribute when there is a commercial model behind the product that seeks to commercialize the code itself. In my experience, the line tends to be drawn at companies that dual license 100% of the code (like MySQL used to). If you can get 100% of the code under an open license, even if you can pay and get it under a proprietary license, the community, while uneasy, is still accepting. Those companies with a “community” version and an “enterprise” version cross that line (since the features in the enterprise version are not open) and thus discourage contribution.

Eric S. Raymond, one of the creators of the term “open source”, references in Homesteading the Noosphere what he calls the “gift culture”. While open source removes some of the philosophical trappings of free software, it is still driven by the idea that the code produced is a gift. Webster defines a gift as “something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation”.

It seems from the InfoWorld post that certain creators of open source software are expecting compensation, in either money or free code contribution. No wonder they are unhappy. If you expect or require compensation, don’t use the open source model or an open source license.

If you want to realize the true benefits of open source, it helps if you embrace it fully. If you want to sell software licenses, then open source is probably not for you. We are blessed at OpenNMS to have a community that includes over 40 people with full commit access to our code repository. It has taken us almost a decade to build to that, but one way we have done it is by being completely honest about our 100% open source development philosophy. That has built up trust between the commercial side and the community side of the project that we’re not just here to sell the honey the community bees make (to borrow an analogy).

I love our leeches and free loaders and anyone who finds value in the OpenNMS project. Outside of our committers, we have tons of people who answer questions on the mailing lists, update the wiki or contribute in some measurable way to the success of the project just by using it.

Sometimes when I meet people at conferences they’ll say “we love OpenNMS, but I’m sorry that we don’t buy a support contract”. I always reply “Don’t worry about it – just the fact that you find the work we do useful is thanks enough”.

Consider it a gift.

UPDATE: We were on a call with a new client in California, and we asked them why they chose OpenNMS. They told us that their bandwidth provider, AT&T, told them to, since that is was they use in house. Heh, I guess that makes AT&T a damn leech, right? (grin)

Be Well, Honduras

Posted on by tarus

This morning a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Honduras.

Just recently we at OpenNMS welcomed a new client from Honduras, so Jeff sent them a note to make sure they were okay. This is the response we got back:

Yes as a matter of fact we felt the earthquake at 2am, but thankfully we are all fine and dry. Here in Tegucigalpa the quake was not so strong and there was very little damage if any.

But on the other hand our network suffered some damage and many of our sites which are closer to the epicenter are running on generators since 2am and are now very low on fuel, and other sites lost their microwave alignments. So we have a bit of a mess right now.

I’m glad everyone is okay and my thoughts are with you. Let’s hope that a minimal loss of mobile phone service is the worst that happens.