Community

Order of the Blue Polo Profile: Michael Shuler

Posted on by tarus

It is almost seven years ago to the day that I became an administrator of the OpenNMS project and started out on my own to build a company to provide services around the application.

At the time I had three customers: a hospital in Minnesota, a government agency in Florida, and a growing hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas, called Rackspace.

The hospital is still a client (having renewed yearly support seven times they are an example that we must be doing something right) but the other two are not (although they both still use the product). I lost the government agency in 2003 when there was an accident that caused all spending to freeze, but we had Rackspace as a client up until last year.

The reasons that Rackspace no longer pays for support are myriad, but I’m happy as long as they still find the product valuable. I wasn’t quite sure this was the case until we got an OBP entry from Michael Shuler this week.

I knew Rackspace when it was much, much smaller, and I’ve watched it grow into the large, publicly traded company it has become. I’m still a big fan, and their concept of “Fanatical Support” has been heavily borrowed by our company. But a company with thousands of employees and public shareholders to please is a different animal than one staffed by a small group of highly intelligent mavericks, and I can’t say that I don’t miss the old days at Rackspace.

I used to go down to San Antonio where we worked on the darkened second floor of the Broadway Bank building. The days were spent solving both complex and interesting problems, but about 6pm the gang would take a break and play Return to Castle Wolfenstein. This included everyone – from the newest hire to the VP. It was a true “work hard/play hard” environment and it was a lot of fun.

Many of those people are gone now. The VP is off at Google, and others have decided to go someplace smaller. However, there is still some of that entrepreneurial feeling at a division of Rackspace called Racklabs.

Rackspace long ago figured out hosting, but they are smart enough to realize that they can’t sit on their laurels forever. Racklabs is where the new technologies are built, such as their cloud computing offerings, and it still retains the old spirit I’m familiar with.

I’ve never met Michael but we’ve corresponded a bit through e-mail. To be honest, his letter got me all verklempt. I was trying to find a bit to excerpt but it’s all so good that I can’t. Go read it.

As Rackspace grew and had to expand, the new people they hired were more comfortable with tools other than OpenNMS. In some areas it became easier to buy a commercial product than to spend the time to get OpenNMS to do what they needed, although I like to think that as OpenNMS improves that one day they’ll start using us as well. I wish them well, but it hasn’t always worked in the past. If you want to get a laugh out of a Rackspace old-timer, just mentioned the work “onyx” (like the stone). They’ll know what I mean.

Regardless of whether I get paid by them or not, I owe Rackspace a debt of gratitude. Perhaps that’s why I get so caught up on community. I have never measured success in terms of raw revenue. I prefer to measure it in terms of usefulness. Create something useful, treat people fairly, and the revenue will come.

Our mission statement has always been “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money”. It may not make Sand Hill Road happy, but it makes us happy, and I guess in the long run that’s all that matters.

The Blue Polos Are Here!

Posted on by tarus

I got the first shipment of blue polos today. I’m teaching class this week so most of my admin time is in the evening, but I hope to get them out soon. Please send us a picture of you in your shirt so we can add it to your OBP page.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write up a testimonial about OpenNMS, and thanks in advance to those of you who plan to write one soon.

For people in the US, you should have your polos no later than next week, and for everyone outside of the country, it should take no longer than two weeks (except for you folks down in Oz – don’t know why it takes so long to ship stuff there).

Oh, on a side note, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I saw in the April newsletter of another management company that they have started a similar program, except instead of sending everyone shirts they are giving away two (2) Netbooks.

We must be doing something right if a company that has spent millions on marketing is taking cues from our little operation down in North Carolina. Plus, when you have raised US$14 million, nothing says love like a $300 Netbook.

We can’t compete with our $35 Lands End polos, but they sure feel nice against the skin. (grin)

Thanks again and keep ’em coming.

The 2009 OpenNMS User Conference Europe Is Now Online

Posted on by tarus

If you didn’t have a chance to make it to the first OpenNMS Users Conference held in Frankfurt this year, well, your life is just a little bit less exciting than it could be. But there’s good news – through the magic of the Internet you can watch all of the presentations and get the program slides.

Many thanks to the gang at Nethinks for creating this amazing web page and encoding all of the video. As you can see it is designed to display more than one year, and we hope to make next year’s conference even bigger and better – if that is at all possible.

So don’t miss your chance to hear me drone on and on for over two and a half hours, especially if you need a cure for insomnia.

But seriously, don’t miss the other presentations by the fine group of OpenNMS community members who made this conference the success it was, and continue to make OpenNMS the only choice for a 100% free and open source enterprise management platform.

OpenNMS in the May Edition of iX Magazine

Posted on by tarus

Klaus sent me the good news that a review of OpenNMS has been printed in iX Magazine, the leading German language publication for IT professionals.


Picture by Klaus Thielking-Riechert

The article was written by Alexander Finger, Klaus Thielking-Riechert, and Ronny Trommer. They are also working on the first OpenNMS book, which we hope to have published by the end of the year.

Many thanks to the guys for taking the time to write this, and to iX for publishing it.

Order of the Blue Polo Profile: Tyler Mills

Posted on by tarus

Many thanks to those people who have already filled out their testimonials for the Order of the Blue Polo. I’ll be placing my first order for shirts tomorrow, so I should be able to ship them out in about two weeks.

The next person I wish to highlight in my series on OBP members is Taylor Mills.

The company he works for, Pavlov Media, supplies communication services to apartment complexes, thus scalability is a primary concern. He is using OpenNMS to monitor over 6500 devices, and by using it he does not “need to worry about the scalability of the platform”.

This is one thing we strive for with OpenNMS: scalability. Coupled with our determination to provide the software without “per device” software licenses, I think it would be hard to find a better solution. Think about it: even at US$10 a device they would be paying US$65,000 a year to monitor their network, and considering that many proprietary and neo-proprietary solutions run upwards of US$100 a device, the savings are considerable.

Outside of scalability, OpenNMS was designed to be an open platform. Tyler writes, “we have been able to integrate it with our ticketing system, export graphs to web pages to make available to certain parties, and mold it to our needs”. Exactly what OpenNMS was designed to do.

Please check out his testimonial where he also gives out the specs for his system hardware. Fast disks are always a plus for data collection, and having a separate database server can provide serious benefits in performance on a network of this size.

The Sharecropper Model for Commercial Open Source

Posted on by tarus

As I was running through my RSS feeds this morning, Roberto Galoppini pointed me to a post by James Dixon (the CTO of Pentaho) on the Beekeeper Model for Commercial Open Source (PDF).

It references Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm which I’ve used for years to drive our OpenNMS business, so it caught my attention. I haven’t blogged much about open core for awhile, but I thought this article deserved a closer look.

Since I’ve been labeled a hippy open-source purist, let me state again my contention that companies that label themselves “open source”, including “commercial open source,” need to produce products where 100% of the software code is available under the OSI Open Source Definition via an OSI approved license. If the business model involves generating the majority of revenue by selling “enterprise” software via traditional closed licenses, that software doesn’t meet the definition of open source and should not be called such. I’m perfectly happy with “Commercial Open Core” but let’s not confuse a neo-proprietary software model with open source.

My bullshit meter jumped slightly when I read his list of open core companies:

Companies using the single-vendor or open-core commercial open source models include MySQL, Ingres, Compiere, Open Bravo, Liferay, SugarCRM, Mule, Alfresco, JBoss, Digium, and Zimbra.

The meter only jumped a little because he used the term “or” instead of “and”, but on reading the rest of the article it seems like they are equivalent, so I need to point out that not all of these companies are open core.

Everyone who calls their company “open source” likes to be compared to JBoss since they were purchased for so much money, but I want to stress that JBoss isn’t open core. From their website

you can see that there is no code differences between JBoss Community and JBoss Enterprise. Sure, you get patches, and hot fixes and gobs of benefits by being an Enterprise customer, but special code is not one of them.

Digium is very similar. We love the gang over Digium as they strive to make sure their code is 100% open, and we use their software in-house as well.

It is also my understanding that MySQL, another successful open source company, made 100% of its code available until a year or so before their acquisition by Sun. In that last year I believe that “enterprise” customers got to see code six months or so before it was released into the wild, which while unfortunate, still resulted in all of the code being open. Prior to that you could get MySQL under an open license or you could purchase a proprietary license and imbed it in your commercial product. As long as the open and proprietary version are basically the same code I think this is a legitimate way for an open source company to generate revenue from software licenses.

Someone please correct me if I have my MySQL facts wrong.

In two if not all three cases they pass the CentOS test, and thus I don’t consider these companies to be open core.

Mr. Dixon did score points with his statement on open source software vs. free software:

Open source is not free. In 1998 the term ‘open source’ was coined to replace the term ‘free software’ because many people assumed ‘free’ to mean ‘zero cost’ whereas it was always intended to mean ‘freedom’.

That’s it in a nutshell. Open source requires a different kind of cost, but you don’t get a free (gratis) solution. However, people have taken it a step further to mean that commercial software can be called open source since commercial software is not free, too. “Syllogisms are only partially convertable. While Alma Cogen is dead … only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogen”.

His entire section on The Principles of Open Source is pretty spot-on. I found myself warming to Mr. Dixon.

Then we get to the meat of his document, his four models of software development:

  • The Wild Hive Model for Open Source Projects
  • The Maple Syrup Farm Model for Proprietary Software Companies
  • The Beekeeper Model for Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source
  • The Honey Gatherer Model for Services/Support commercial Open Source

This is interesting stuff, so please read it for yourself. It is so elegant and comes with nice little drawings that it took me awhile to understand why my bullshit meter was pegged.

Then it dawned on me. Instead of the Beekeeper model it should be called the Sharecropper model. The single vendor controls everything while benefitting from the community, while the community only exists to serve the single vendor. When he writes “In the Beekeeper Model the bee farm provides land, hives, and flowers etc.” it is just like a plantation owner in the old South owning all the land and means of production. The bees are not in control of their destiny, much like some sharecroppers were told when, where and what to plant.

This is at the heart of my problem with open core software. In a vibrant open source community it is the community that controls the product, not the vendor. Mr. Dixon states:

This explains the common practice of the Beekeeper companies to offer some kind of ‘Enterprise Edition’ that includes features not available to the community. These are high-end features that only larger organizations find of value.

Who decides what features are of what value? As I mentioned in my Hyperic post awhile ago their community is screaming for a feature that only exists in the “enterprise” version, yet their needs go unmet. It is obvious that Joe User needs the feature but because it drives software revenue it will never be open. According to Dixon is necessary because

It is clear that the single-vendor model is more costly to set up and operate than the services/support model. It is logical that companies using the Beekeeper Model need to generate more revenue to recoup these costs than a company using the Honey Gatherer Model

No, it is logical that if the only way you can meet your revenue needs is by selling commercial software then your open source business model is broken. Don’t say “pure” open source doesn’t work if the problem is you can’t run your business properly.

There are several other things that just slapped me upside the head:

The community gains open source software they can use for their own purposes. This software has more functionality and more resources than a ‘pure’ open source project could provide. In this way the community profits directly from the company and its customers.

If he means that an open source project with a commercial backer has more functionality, then I’d say “well, duh, of course”. But there is no reason that making money on an open source project is in conflict with being “pure”.

The customers gain higher quality software at a better price. The customers profit from the open source community’s ability to produce high quality software.

In the first statement he implies that in order to produce high quality software you have to have a commercial entity producing it, but then here he states it is the community that produces the high quality software. Which is it?

As far as price, nothing could be better than free, I agree. But if he is talking about customers having to buy enterprise versions of “open source” software the math gets a little hazy.

For example, in our space OpenNMS provides unlimited Standard Support for US$14,995 a year. Zenoss, an open core company, charges US$150/device for a minimum of 250 devices for its “enterprise” software, or US$37,500 a year, over twice as much as we do and limited to 250 devices.

However, if you take our average commercial install of 2000 devices, the Zenoss price would be US$300,000 per year. That is insane – you might as well buy OpenView or Tivoli. Over 5 years the cost will be must less than the US$1.5 million Zenoss will charge. Of course, no one should be paying list price for their software, but it is so wrong to call it open source even if you can haggle it down.

A prospective customer should not have to learn about open source in order to become a customer. The sales and marketing materials should neither hide their open source model nor require understanding of it by the market.

Why shouldn’t a prospective customer “not have to learn about open source”? Aren’t there some serious advantages to open source? That’s like saying Toyota shouldn’t educate its clients on the hybrid synergy drive on its cars. True, the customer shouldn’t have to be able to build one or understand exactly how it works, but I would think the basics of why you would want one should be explained early and often.

Educating the market will be the downfall of the open core business model once people realize that there may be “pure” open source offerings that do it better. After listing the benefits of open source so well in The Principles of Open Source why does Dixon feel it is not important to the buying decision?

Customers are not bees, bees are not customers, and you cannot convert one to another.

With OpenNMS a good portion of our clients are also actively involved in the community. In fact we encourage this. Many, if not all of our customers came to us from the community. With our commercial support offerings, however, there isn’t a requirement of community involvement. What I get out of this statement is that the single vendor company sees the community (the bees) and their customers as separate things, and will focus on the needs of the customer, in order to generate revenue, versus the needs of the community.

Some people assume that all commercial open source models are flawed because the company does not have direct control over the direction of, and development of, the software … The services/support model does suffer from this. The company might pay for full-time developers to work on some of the open source projects that it utilizes but it does not have the same level of influence that the single-vendor model provides.

This has not been my experience. The statement that single-vendor (open core) models have more influence goes back to my plantation owner analogy – the sharecroppers/bees/community are told what to do since the plantation owner controls everything. At the OpenNMS project, influence is based on merit. We have a number of full time developers who both create code and help integrate the contributions of the people outside of our company. Since we get to work on it full time we produce more code which earns us influence. However, every major project decision is governed by the Order of the Green Polo, which got there also on merit (and not always by writing code).

It seems like in the Beekeeper model influence is bought. You, the community, do what I say since I pay for everything. And, by the way, I have to sell software in order to pay for it. It seems to be the antithesis of the open source communities I’ve known.

In summary, I do think the need for a “whole product” is valid, but I don’t think it is necessary to sell commercial software licenses in order to deliver it. The “Honey Gatherer” can deliver the whole product without resorting to commercial software licenses.

Part of my antagonism toward the model comes from the fact that Pentaho sells an “enterprise edition” and thus is an open core/neo-proprietary company, and since those companies have co-opted the term “open source” I am naturally distrustful. It’s like saying “we love the bees, we need the bees, but no royal jelly for you” and I think that is wrong within an open source environment.

But this model is slick and well written and it did make me think, which is always welcome.

Order of the Blue Polo Profile: Ho Trong Dat

Posted on by tarus

When we started the Order of the Blue Polo, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s been interesting, since most of the OBP members so far are people I either didn’t know or haven’t heard from in a long time, and some people I figured would be the first to jump on it haven’t (probably due to the fact we require a company name).

Back in 2002, OpenNMS was pretty much just me in my attic (well, the room over the garage). The economy was still depressed post-9/11 and sometimes I wondered if it was all worth it (luckily I don’t give up too easily).

However, something happened in September of that year that gave me my first glance into how powerful an open source community could become, and it strengthened my resolve to make OpenNMS the de facto management platform used by everyone.

It was a letter from Vietnam.

Hi MAN.
I am calling you MAN because I consider you as a great man in NMS field. You and your band have made an wonderful product as I’ve ever seen and used. I am using OpenNMS 1.0 ( from 0.8.x) at my sites for approximately a year and it keep running well. In future, we will use NMS to monitor almost our VNPT’s network ( VNPT – Vietnam Post and Telecomunication ).

Here our information:
CDIT – Center for Development of Information Technology-VNPT
http://cdit.com.vn/
VietNam

I hope some day I will have a chance to contriubte my little knowledge for OpenNMS’s development.
Best regard.

It was from a man named Ho Trong Dat and it seriously made my day, if not my month. Here I was, working by myself in a little town in rural North Carolina, getting a great letter from a guy in freakin’ Vietnam (and while some readers will probably chuckle at the English, Dat’s English is a hell of a lot better than my Vietnamese).

Note: In most Asian cultures the family name comes before the given name, and I make sure I am aware of this when I travel. However, especially in Japan, some business cards will compensate by reversing them on the “English” side of the card. Note that I said “some” and since I don’t read Japanese I often can’t figure out if it has been done or not. It’s an example where accommodations made for Westerners cause more problems than they solve. So let me apologize in advance if I ever get your names backward.

Another Note: Vietnam has become a popular tourist destination. Think about it – in 40 years the in place to be might be Bagdad.

I was both surprised and extremely happy to see that Dat was to become one of the founding members of the OBP.

Dear OpenNMS users

My name is Dat and I am working for CDIT, a subsidiary company belong to PTIT (Post & Telecommunication Institute of Technology). We are R&D centre. We know OpenNMS when we researched about open source software.

We have been using OpenNMS in CDIT since 2002. From that time, OpenNMS did not release the first version, still 0.9, I remember. We had to install and reinstall OpenNMS a lot of time to get familiar with it. After six month, we finally and totally control OpenNMS in administrating our network. We deployed an WAN for our mother company (VNPT) with over 50 network nodes (router, firewall), a lot of servers (30). Using OpenNMS, we can monitor the status of links between subsidiaries, the performance of the link, of the server. We also monitor a lot of services such as : email, web of collaboration – our internal website, file servers, We think OpenNMS is a very convenient, flexible and highly configurable network management software. We feel happy when using OpenNMS.

Thanks you guys who have been developing such a nice and beautiful software.

So here is a guy from halfway around the world who used OpenNMS back when it first came out, and nearly seven years later he’s still using it (plus Dat’s English is much improved).

It’s letters like these that make me feel happy making OpenNMS.

2009 OpenNMS Users Conference Europe

Posted on by tarus

Sorry for the delay in posting this. Right after the conference I took a two day trip to Dresden, and no sooner had a landed back in the US I was off to DC. Just not enough hours in the day.

I was extremely pleased with the Users Conference, and it seemed that people who attended got a lot out of it. We had between 40-50 people in total from over 10 countries.

Friday afternoon I went down to the hotel lobby and the OpenNMS folk started gathering together. We chatted until about 7pm when the Nethinks people showed up and we went off to a restaurant for dinner and beer.

Since I had to speak for several hours the next day I left early, but after 10pm the party moved to another area of the restaurant and went on for awhile.

The conference was in three hotel “ballrooms”. The first hosted the coffee while the other two were used for presentations. Once I managed to get my Mac to talk with the projector, things went smoothly.

My first talk was an overview of OpenNMS coupled with four case studies, each focusing on a specific functional area: data collection, service monitoring, remote monitoring and events. After a short break I talked about the features coming in version 1.8. I think both talks were well received.

After a fabulous lunch buffet in the hotel restaurant, the afternoon session began. Alex and Antonio had both forgotten the cable needed to connect their MacBooks to the projector, so they ran off to buy one. We moved Jonathan’s presentation on the Trouble Ticket API and Ronny’s Reporting Enhancements talk up a slot to cover for them, and they were back in time to do the Syslog and Mapping talks, respectively. The day ended with Jason’s Enhancement Talk and Jeff’s Asterisks lecture.

It was cool that there seemed to be roughly an even number of attendees in each session, so we seemed to have scheduled that well.

All the slides are available on the web site, and I believe that the video from the conference will be made available soon. I’ll post when they are.

None of this would have been possible without the work of Alex Finger and Uwe Bergmann. I believe that Nethinks will make a great partner for OpenNMS in Germany. Also, special recognition should go to Simona Bott for doing all of the heavy lifting in making this things possible.

On one final note, my friends from the Netherlands bought me stroopwafles.

Yum.

From the O to the U to the C to the E

Posted on by tarus

Once again I find myself at an airport, this time O’Hare, on a gray and rainy afternoon. I have a huge … nine hour layover, but at least I’ll be able to get some work done. I’ll arrive in Frankfurt around noon tomorrow.

And then it’s time for the OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe, the first of its kind and what is shaping up to be the OpenNMS event of the year. We’ve had a really nice response and are pretty close to the maximum number of people we can host, although if you are still interested we’ll keep registration open pretty much until the day of the conference (or until we reach our limit).

They have me speaking for almost three hours, so I hope I can keep everyone’s interest. For the first hour and a half I plan on an OpenNMS overview as well as some case studies for how OpenNMS is being used to solve real-world problems.

The second hour and 15 minutes will be focused on OpenNMS 1.8. Now that we managed to get our first stable release in three years out last year, we are moving to a more rapid and focused release process. Version 1.8 is all about discovery and provisioning. The new provisioning daemon (provisiond) is pretty amazing. We’ve always been about scalability and have demonstrated it in the past by monitoring very large networks, but this takes it to another level. Everything is policy based, and it is designed to make it extremely easy to plug in new discovery “detectors”.

Plus there are a number of other features, such as the RANCID integration, Layer-2 SNMP status polling and the WMI collector that I’ll cover as well. OpenNMS 1.8 is due in June. As usual it will be done when it is done, but considering that most of this exists in trunk now the date is reasonable.

I’m really looking forward to the afternoon sessions, when the Windbag of OpenNMS gets to sit down and bask in the collective wisdom that is our community. As with most conferences I attend, much of the fun is in what happens between sessions and I’m hoping we can find some nice place for dinner and beer afterward.

Many thanks again to Alex and the team at Nethinks for putting this together. I’ll be sure to post lots of updates.