Conferences

Final Thoughts on OUCE 2013

Posted on by tarus

Now that I’ve had some sleep, I wanted to make a few last comments on the Users Conference.

I think the Foundation did a wonderful job ‎with their first conference. All of the feedback I got was positive, with a lot of long time attendees thinking this was the best one yet. I think what made it work was the vibe that this was “user driven”. Heck, even the location for meals, Café Chaos, is student run and managed, and they also handled the catering.

It was a little hard to say goodbye to old friends and new, but many had lives to get back to and trains to catch. Those of us left ended up at the Wiesenmühle beer garden, the traditional ending to the conference. I was extremely happy to see that Dunkel was still in season.

A tradition I didn’t want to repeat was the excessive schnapps consumption of last year, but it just wouldn’t be right without one or two.

Of course, David (pictured on the right) accidentally overrode my order with the waitress for “zehn” (10) glasses and managed to count two more people at our table than were actually there. Thus he and Markus (pictured left) ended up with the two left over shots (Markus since he missed all the “fun” last year).

I had an early flight so managed to leave while feeling very happy and content. It is a shame I have to wait until next year to see everyone again.

Speaking of next year, we are looking for a venue. The team would like to move the conference around Europe. We need a place with two conference/class rooms, a place for everyone to gather and eat, and enough hotel rooms to accomodate everyone. Good public transportation and proximity to an airport are also important. If you know of one, be sure to drop a note to the Foundation folks.

I’ll leave you with this picture. I’m not sure how I managed to take it, actually. It’s supposed to be of a glass of Schwarzer Hahn beer, but I think it turned out pretty cool.

2013 OpenNMS Users Conference

Posted on by tarus

This was the week for the fifth annual OpenNMS Users Conference in Fulda, Germany. I had grand plans for blogging about the event, but as usual things got away from me and now I am getting started on the last day.

I spent last week teaching an OpenNMS course to ten students from a local company in North Carolina. While I love teaching people about OpenNMS, it took a lot out of me. Even for “the Mouth”, talking for 8 or 9 straight hours for days on end can be difficult.

The class ended on Friday and I had just enough time to head home, do laundry and pack before leaving for the airport on Saturday morning to head toward Fulda.

One of my tasks was to bring Ulf, the OpenNMS mascot. While I was waiting for my plane to Dallas (I hate flying through Heathrow so, yes, I went two hours in the wrong direction just so I could get a direct flight to Frankfurt) I ran into the UNC Womens Gymnastic’s team and they were kind enough to pose for a picture.

The rest of the trip to Frankfurt was pretty uneventful. At the airport I was met by Markus, who was acting as chauffeur, as well as Jeff who came in from Atlanta and Gary from Kansas City. We drove to Markus’s house where he and his wife Sandra had prepared a nice lunch. Some of the other people from the conference came by, and we had a great time chatting into the evening.

For dinner we visited a traditional German restaurant in Fulda called the Schwarzer Hahn. While we were eating I was able to ask a question about the German language. When I travel, I like to leave a tip for the housekeeping staff at my hotel. I asked them for the German word for “housekeeping” and they replied that there really wasn’t one, but I could try “zimmermädchen” or “room maid”. On Monday morning I left a note and three euros for the cleaning staff using my new found German words.

On Monday we prepared for the conference. For the last four years the conference had been organized by Nethinks, a certified OpenNMS partner with offices in Fulda, and I’ve been to Fulda on a number of other occasions (this year it was organized by the newly formed OpenNMS Foundation). When a friend of mine decided to make the four hour trip from Bayreuth just to visit me, I was able to show her around Fulda like a native.

Did I mention it was cold? I think it is kind of important to mention how cold it was – most of the time it was a few degrees below freezing – so the Fulda tour pretty much involved finding great places to eat and have coffee.

We ended up at Hochschule Fulda, the site of this year’s conference, and we got to see Christian’s Raspberry Pi controlled coffee maker. The interface is in the style of the replicator from Star Trek, and you can simply state, in German “Computer – coffee please”. It was kind of cool to see it work, but we found out that with Jeff’s accent the difference between “make a coffee” and “perform the cleaning function” are similar. (sigh)

Speaking of language issues, when I got back to my room on Monday night I found that my note and three euros were still on the desk. When I met Jeff for breakfast and told him about it, he asked to see the note, and when I showed it to him he immediately started to laugh. I had written “Zimmer Mädchen Danke” and apparently by adding the space I was not addressing the cleaning woman but instead I was asking to have a young woman (Mädchen) for my room. While I had other German speakers tell me that it would have been a stretch for someone to arrive at that conclusion, others start laughing the moment I mention adding the space. Of course, being German, some of them simply point out that three euros is not enough money and that three 50 euro notes would have been more appropriate.

(heavy sigh)

Tuesday morning I awoke to see about six inches of snow on the ground. Apparently it was bad enough in Frankfurt that they closed the airport. This did impact some of the people coming to the conference, but for those on trains it was only delays versus cancellations.

The conference officially started on Tuesday with a Basic Training Day. I tried to fit about two and half days of training into one, but even with some drastic cuts and pre-installing OpenNMS, it took ten hours to cover the OpenNMS basics. The class was cool and let me talk until 7pm, but I was really looking forward to Wednesday and my first “down day” in weeks.

Dinner was at the Havanna Bar, where we went to celebrate Jeff’s birthday. Tobi Oetiker had arrived (although a little late due to the snow) and it was nice to be able to spend some time with him. He had come up to do an RRDtool tool talk on Wednesday. After dinner I told everyone not to expect me until noon.

At 8:30 Wednesday morning my phone rings. Jeff is sick and can I come in and teach? I quickly shower, dress and head over to the school, where I proceeded to improvise eight hours of advanced OpenNMS training. I think it went well, and I only ran about 30 minutes over the allotted time, but to say I was exhausted at the end of the day would be an understatement.

I skipped the evening activities and tried to get a little rest, but soon realized that I needed a lot of rest. I felt ill, but I wasn’t sure if it was related to illness or just exhaustion. I went to sleep but woke at 5am in order to get my demo working for my “What’s New in OpenNMS” talk on Thursday morning. I literally had to build a fresh OpenNMS release since major bug fixes had been added by Ben Wednesday night, and I think the demo was well received with the exception that loading the VMWare topology database via OSGi failed (it had worked at the hotel).

I ended the talk with a Steve Jobs style “one more thing …” This is very hard to do with an open source project, since by its very nature open source software doesn’t hide anything (I was always amused by those fauxpensource companies that promised an “unveiling” of new software at various trade shows). My “one more thing” was to point out that the best new thing in OpenNMS is the OpenNMS Foundation. The creation of this independent users group means a lot to me, and I think it will insure the continued growth and success of OpenNMS.

At lunch on Thursday I heard a nice story. One of the attendees had a performance review via Skype the day before, and he was told that he had received a prestigious “innovators” award from his company. The reason was his introduction of OpenNMS to this large corporation that had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on products from HP and BMC.

Cool.

Unfortunately, I missed the rest of Thursday. I simply could not go on. I went back to the hotel and crashed, but managed to get up in time to visit the Havanna Bar for the conference social event. We had over seventy people in the upstairs dining room, and I spent most of the night with a table of Germans and Ville, a Finn who works at Vaadin and is living in Frankfurt.

At one point the talk turned to language, and it was pointed out that there are only five words in German that end in the letters “nf”. I thought that was cool, since the German word for “five”, fünf, is one of those words. However, no one at the table could name all five, and one person found an article that stated there were only four (apparently there is a dispute).

This bothered me, since I felt it was important that there be five since fünf would be one of them, so Ville and I decided to introduce the word “pünf” to the German language, which is defined as “the feeling when one realizes they should have stopped eating 15 minutes ago”. Both of us were feeling very pünf at that moment.

Speaking of language, I think we should all adopt the German term for the mobile phone, which is “handy”. My reasoning is that the word “phone” is outdated (I rarely use the “phone” function of my handy). John Scalzi in “Old Man’s War” called them “hand terminals”. That is accurate if a little long, so we should shorten it to “handy”.

At one point in the evening I remember looking around the room at everyone laughing and talking, and thinking “I put this in motion”. Not the conference, as that was done by better people than me, but when I took over the OpenNMS project in 2002 to keep it from dying, I never thought that it would grow so much beyond what I started.

I left the event a little early, as I was still not feeling my best, and I walked back to the hotel through the light snow. I got to sleep a little after 11pm and slept in until 7:30. When I awoke I felt better than I had all week, so I am hoping it that I was just tired and that I’m not getting sick.

So far on Friday I’ve seen a couple of cool talks. Almost all of the talks in this conference are being given by OpenNMS end users. I saw one on integrating OpenNMS with Salt Stack (a Puppet/Chef-like configuration management tool) and one on the new Scale Free Topology Provider.

I hate that I missed most of the talks yesterday, but I think the organizers have done a great job with this conference and I look forward to what they come up with next year.

The only thing I would change is the weather.

2013 OpenNMS Users Conference

Posted on by tarus

On Saturday I am off to Germany for the 2013 OpenNMS Users Conference and you should be there, too.

Seriously, this is going to be the place to be for OpenNMS and network management in general. What excites me the most about it is that this whole conference was organized and staffed by OpenNMS users and not The OpenNMS Group. The non-profit OpenNMS Foundation was founded to promote OpenNMS and build an independent users community around it, and based upon the registrations so far it looks like they will be successful.

In any case I am looking forward to “gettin’ my geek on” in Fulda next week, and I think if you ask nicely you can still get registered.

User Conference 2013: Automating Orders of Consumables

Posted on by tarus

If you haven’t booked your trip to Fulda for the OpenNMS Users Conference, you should do so soon. It promises to be full of awesome, and I for one am excited to be in the audience for once, listening to the ingenuous ways people have come up with for using OpenNMS.

One talk in particular has caught my eye. It’s by Jan Stoetzer and it’s called “Automated Orders of Consumables Using OpenNMS“.

One of the tasks of our OpenNMS installation is to monitor the page counters and toner levels of our printers, copiers, faxes etc. Out there the idea to was born to automatically reorder toner.

Meanwhile our OpenNMS is able to order every supply. Toners, developer units, ozone filters, theoretically even soda cans for Tarus’s OpenVND drink machine.

In this short talk I want to show you how we realized this.

This is one of the great things I love about open source. I scratched an itch and built a monitorable soda machine, and now someone has taken the basic premise and extended it.

This is the first conference event organized by The OpenNMS Foundation, an independent non-profit created to promote OpenNMS, and it is the first conference event that is focused totally on end users with content from end users. I look forward to getting my OpenNMS geek on with everyone in a few weeks.

The OpenNMS Foundation

Posted on by tarus

I am extremely excited to be able to finally announce the formation of the OpenNMS Foundation.

As one of the stewards of the OpenNMS project, I have tried my best to separate the .org project side of OpenNMS from the .com commercial revenue side. Every bit of code we (the .com folks) write is published under an open source license, but I think the key to any great open source project is to have a vibrant and active independent users group.

Part of that thinking comes from my experience with Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView product line. At one time it was the de facto standard for network management, driven in large part by an ecosystem of integrations and add-on products from other vendors. The independent OpenView Forum users group used to have conferences with attendance in the thousands. That users group was key to the success of the OpenView platform.

Of course, when those “other” vendors such as SMARTS, BMC and Micromuse started to become large, HP reacted in the wrong way and sought greater control over the OVForum. That was the beginning of the end.

The number of independent contributors to OpenNMS has always been a source of pride to me, but I never felt quite confident that our merry band had what it took to survive without the OpenNMS Group. That started to change a couple of years ago when a cluster of OpenNMS users and developers formed in Fulda, Germany, a little town outside of Frankfurt and home to a university.

Part of the choice of location was due to the influence of Nethinks, one of our German partners. They hosted three successful user conferences and employed one of the founders of the users group. Fulda is also home to a top-notch University, which brought in even more people to the project. Earlier this year, that group along with others got together and formed a non-profit organization to promote open source and OpenNMS.

I’m not sure any of my three readers will understand how happy this makes me. When Oculan decided to stop working on OpenNMS, I was certain the project would die without someone to maintain it. Even as the community and our company grew over the years, I was still afraid that circumstances could arise where the project would die. For the first time in over ten years I feel certain the project could continue without me and without the direct influence of the OpenNMS Group.

The first order of business of the new Foundation is to hold the seminal OpenNMS event in the form of a users conference. Created totally by users for users and held at the University of Fulda, this event will bring together developers, contributors, corporate sponsors and, of course, users, for several days of OpenNMS geekery.

I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

So save the dates of 12-15 March, 2013, and be sure to register. Sponsorship opportunities will be available as well.

I also want to express heartfelt thanks to the folks behind the OpenNMS Foundation for making one of my dreams a reality.

Ohio Linuxfest and MC Frontalot

Posted on by tarus

I have been on a forced hiatus from conferences this year. I love going to them, but they do take up a lot of time and I wanted to focus as much as I could this year on the OpenNMS business.

However, last year I missed the Ohio Linuxfest due to illness, so I wanted to go back this year. We usually sponsor the show, and when I was talking to Robert Ball about doing it again this year, he asked me about ideas for entertainment for the after party on Saturday night.

I suggested we get MC Frontalot.

A few weeks and several e-mails later, I can confirm that the musical stylings of Damian Hess will descend on Columbus for one night only. As a fan I’m pretty excited, and I was happy that we could get him to come to the show.

Note that his show is only open to attendees of the conference, for which admission is free, but the party costs money and is limited to 350 people (the maximum occupancy of the venue).

If you have been on the fence about coming to the OLF this year, perhaps the chance the see MC Frontalot is enough to change your mind. If you’ve never heard of him before, chances are that if you are reading my blog you’ll like him – a lot.

Plus, I’m giving a talk in the new users track about switching to Linux from Apple products if MC Frontalot isn’t enough to get you there.

2012 OpenNMS Users Conference Europe

Posted on by tarus

Schnapps is Evil.

That isn’t the only thing I learned at the fourth annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe (OUCE), but it was the last thing so it stuck in my mind.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After spending a great week in Montréal, I was home for around 33 hours before heading back out to the airport. Even though there is a direct flight from RDU to London, I try to avoid Heathrow whenever possible, so I flew two hours in the opposite direction to catch a flight from DFW to Frankfurt. While the flight was uneventful, I didn’t manage to sleep so you can imagine that I looked and felt my best upon arriving at 8am on Monday.

I met up with Jeff, who had flown in from Atlanta, as well as Ronny and Markus, and we headed to the OpenNMS office in Fulda.

Since it is associated with the University, we then headed to a student run place called Cafe Chaos for coffee and to catch up.

Over time a number of other OpenNMS folks joined us. Christian is working on our VMWare integration, and Dustin is one of our Google Summer of Code folks. Sven brought us a cool little plush toy representing the Planck Epoch, or the universe immediately after the Big Bang.

I’m not sure if it was to scale – those things are pretty hard to measure.

I was also introduced to Club-Mate, the official drink of European hackers. It’s an ice tea-like beverage with a high caffeine content and relatively low sugar. I needed caffeine at the time so I drank a half litre, and I can understand the origin of the drink’s tag line which is “You get used to it”.

After lunch we wandered around campus and looked at the facilities. Since Ronny teaches part time at the school, Markus’s impersonation of a young student calling out to him “Herr Trommer” in a high pitched voice became a meme for the week.

Due to a mixup in scheduling, the OUCE was scheduled the same week as a huge emergency service vehicle convention, so all of the hotels in Fulda were booked, thus we got rooms just outside of town at the Hotel Gasthof Rhönblick. It was actually quite nice for the price, and I always like to stay a place where bikers are welcome. That afternoon we checked in and then headed back to Fulda for dinner.

Monday evening we met up with Uwe from Nethinks and his bride Daniela. While the company was awesome at dinner, by this time it was getting close to 11pm and Jeff and I had been up for 34+ hours, so we called it a night.

On Tuesday the OUCE started with the first of two training days. I did a one day seminar on the basics of OpenNMS. While our formal training offerings are a little more structured and go into greater detail, this is a good introduction to the application. Roughly 90 minutes are spent on each major facet of OpenNMS: provisioning, events, service assurance and data collection. We had a little over 30 students in attendance and everyone seemed to enjoy it (I didn’t see anyone sleep or look to terribly lost).

Wednesday was the second, or advanced, training day. This was added after last year’s conference when people wanted to explore the more complex features of OpenNMS. Jeff and Ronny taught this day (to let my voice rest) and it included things like the remote poller, the trouble ticketing interface and JasperReports. We had a few more people show up to for this class since they had been there the year before, and the only complaint I heard was that it was a lot of material to cover. Even when some of the hands-on stuff is removed we are trying to squeeze a five day class into two so it can be a bit much to take in.

On Thursday the OUCE kicked off in earnest. We decided to split the two days into a standard conference agenda on Day One and then a Barcamp on Day Two.

I started the day off with a presentation on the State of OpenNMS, which included a review of the new features in OpenNMS 1.10 as well as the future direction as we build toward 2.0. I also was able to present a mockup of a new user interface based on Vaadin.

This was followed by a great presentation by Alex Finger on project management for large NMS deployments. As someone who has been creating network management solutions for 25 years I can’t stress enough the need for some formal project management structure in order to guarantee the success of such projects.

It was during this talk that I started to structure the agenda for the OpenNMS Users Conference Americas (OUCA) to be held at the end of June. While a lot of people involved with OpenNMS are technical, many tend to have more political than technical challenges to overcome, so I thought it would be cool to have a track focused on the politics of getting a solution like OpenNMS into an organization instead of just how to use it. Alex is going to give this presentation again in Minneapolis as part of that track.

The next four talks were focused on integration. Jeff and Ronny talked about integrating OpenNMS with Puppet. Markus did a very technical talk on instrumenting Java applications with JMX so that OpenNMS could be used to monitor metrics from inside the applications themselves. Michael Batz from Nethinks demonstrated how he was able to use NagViz, a tool designed to integrate with Nagios, to present data from OpenNMS in a graphical format (i.e. maps), and I closed the day with a “Stupid Data Collector Tricks” presentation that included, among other things, a detailed description of my OpenVND project where we used OpenNMS to monitor a drink machine.

After seeing how well these talks were received, I invited the presenters to repeat them for the OUCA. It kinda solidified the theme of “Integration” for the conference. Although, perhaps we’d have more people show up if we unpacked our suitcase of “happy cloud”.

At the end of my presentation we got together to plan Friday’s barcamp. Everyone got up and introduced themselves, and we took down suggestions for topics and placed them on the wall. People would then vote on the talks they most wanted to see, and the top talks would be presented.

We had a little time for a break before everyone headed to the local brewery for an evening event, and no, this is not where the Schnapps comes in. I really like the Wiesenmühle – the beer is excellent and the food is good – although I was unhappy that this wasn’t the right time of year for Dunkel.

After eating, I excused myself for a couple of hours so that I could head to the office and catch up on e-mails and phone calls. Two hours later when I went back there were some hardcore OpenNMS folks still at it, but our designator driver was able to drive everyone back to the hotel.

Friday we split the day up into two tracks. The first session found me discussing some useful Net-SNMP tricks while Ronny discussed some ideas for using OpenNMS to monitor IPMI interfaces.

The second session was combined to discuss developing the European user community. While it didn’t get a ton of votes, I felt it was important enough to warrant the slot, and considering that we went 30 minutes over the time budget, we had a lot of good discussion. I really, really want to see the development of an independent users group for conferences such as this. I have no problem with The OpenNMS Group acting as a sponsor, but this should be something for the users by the users and I am certain that our partner Nethinks, who carries the majority burden of organizing this thing every year, could use some help. This session resulted in the creation of a new opennms-europe mailing list and I’m hoping to see the discussion continue there for next year’s conference.

After lunch we had three more sessions. In the first one, Ronny talked about Christian’s VSphere integration for monitoring VMWare while Markus talked some more about JMX integration (it was a popular topic). After that I did a presentation on making OpenNMS highly available, while Jeff did a session on Drools integration. His talk went almost an hour over time (well into the afternoon break) so we shifted the last session out even more. In that one, Jeff talked about backup strategies and Michael revisited maps.

During the afternoon we said goodbye to a number of people who had trains to catch, and the overall atmosphere for the conference was very upbeat. People seem to like OpenNMS and are eager to get most out of it, which does require an investment in time and energy even if the software is free.

There was still a core group of us left after everyone else had gone, and by this time I was totally shattered. After being on the road for most of six weeks, and the last two being out of the country, I just needed to unwind.

This is where the Schnapps comes in.

We dropped our bags off at the office at went to a Cuban-themed bar for drinks. Things started off pretty simply, but I am certain I was the one who called for the first round of Schnapps. We relaxed and talked for a long while, and then the subject of dinner came up. Places were still busy, it being a Friday night as well as the other convention being in town, so we decided to head back to the Wiesenmühle for dinner.

And more beer. And more Schnapps.

I forget how much we drank that night. I remember Ronny teasing me around 10pm since that was when I wanted to be in bed, but although my memory is a bit hazy I’m certain that was a couple of hours before we actually stopped for the night. Both Ronny and Markus abstained so they could drive the rest of us back to the hotel.

I don’t really remember that ride.

I do remember getting to the hotel, saying goodbye to Ronny and then remembering, too late, that my laptop bag holding my room key was still in his car. Needing sleep, I found that the doorway to my room was comfortable enough. I then I remember sometime later being wakened by Alex who had managed to get the master key from the innkeeper to let me in my room (these locks used old school physical keys and not key cards).

The next thing I know it was 5am. I’m awake, on my bed, completely clothed, and all the lights are on in the room (I haven’t done that in decades). I set my alarm for 7am, turned off the lights and got undressed for a two hour nap before heading to the airport.

Ronny showed up Saturday morning to drive me, Alex and Ian (another attendee) to the airport. I never saw Jeff. My trip home had me going through Heathrow as I wanted to visit some friends in the UK, and I am happy to report that I managed to stay awake as Martin drove me from the airport to his home in Lyndhurst.

There, his wife Sue plied me with the restorative powers of proper English tea, and after what seemed like about two pots I was pretty much myself. On a walk around Lyndhurst I found the next company car, if I can get it with left hand drive.

Craig visited from Southampton and we had a nice dinner, and I managed my first real good night’s sleep in weeks.

On Sunday, Sue drove me back to the airport in her new Fiat 500 (what a fun little car) and I had an uneventful trip back to Raleigh (where I was happy to find two Global Entry kiosks at customs).

It was a great week, and I hope to capture some of that energy for the conference next month. We have a number of folks signed up already, and remember that the early bird special ends this week. Space is limited due to the capacity of the rooms we’ve rented from the University, so if you are thinking about coming, register soon or drop me a note so I can save you a space.

And remember, Schnapps is Evil.

Upcoming OpenNMS Events

Posted on by tarus

The most exciting part of the year, at least from the perspective of OpenNMS, is now upon us. In the next two months we have a number of awesome events happening.

Next week is our fourth annual OpenNMS Users Conference Europe. There is
still time to register (until Friday) if you want to join us in Germany for four days of classes and presentations:

We have also announced our next week-long training class to be held at company headquarters in Pittsboro, NC, USA the week of 4-8 June.

Next, our seventh (wow) annual developers conference, Dev-Jam 2012, will be held in Minneapolis, MN, USA the last week in June.

If you develop on OpenNMS, this is a great way to spend a week with most of the major contributors and to sharply hone your skills with respect to the OpenNMS code.

And now for the big news, we are also announcing the first ever OpenNMS Users Conference Americas to be held for three days starting 26 June.

Modeled on the European conference, the first day will consist of a seminar (taught by yours truly) covering the basics of OpenNMS. The last day will consist of a barcamp. This is an “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda. We’ll entertain suggestions for talks, vote on them, and then present the most popular ones. With most of the development team in attendance, pretty much any topic is up for grabs and expect it to be addressed by experts.

The middle day is very special. It is a standard conference day that we would like to use to focus on our community. That means you. We’ll be giving a roadmap presentation first thing, but then we’d love to fill the day with presentations by you on how you use OpenNMS.

If you are interested, send an e-mail to the call for papers: cfp@opennms.org telling us what you’d like to talk about. If it gets accepted, you’ll receive a complementary conference pass. I wish I could cover the air travel as well, but we will cover the conference, room and board for our speakers.

Hope to see you in person soon.

Open Source Think Tank 2012

Posted on by tarus

I went to my first Open Source Think Tank conference in Napa, California last week, and since I’ve come back I’ve been trying to think of the best way to write about it without seeming like an ass (well, more of an ass than usual).

I didn’t like it, and found it slightly unpleasant. In defense of the conference, I am certain I was in the minority, and I did really enjoy the networking opportunities, but the conference as a whole was not for me.

I first heard about the Olliance Group’s Think Tanks back in 2007, and I commented about the first one in Europe back in 2008. The event is invitation only, and I complained, tongue in cheek, that I was never invited to such things. I was surprised that Larry Augustin took the time to comment on that entry that no one knew I was interested, and since then I’ve been invited to them all.

Considering our business model of “spend less than you earn” keeps me busy, I have never been able to justify spending several days at a resort in wine country, but it turns out that this year was I going to be in San Francisco that weekend anyway, so I decided to attend to see what the whole thing was about.

In the Thursday opening remarks we were told that we could talk about the conference, but it was courtesy not to quote anyone by name. This was to make sure the conversations could be as open as possible without the attendees having to couch their thoughts within a political agenda. I’m cool with that, so please forgive me if I’m a little short on details in this post. What happens at Think Tank stays at Think Tank.

The conference consists of a couple of days of panel discussions, presentations and in this instance, two case studies. Once a company presents an issue involving open source that they would like to resolve, the attendees break out into teams to discuss a number of questions and possible solutions. On Saturday morning, teams were to present their findings, and the best teams win a Motorola tablet.

One of the case studies consisted of a trade organization that was trying to establish some open standards, but as with most such groups they receive funding by basically hoarding information. We struggle with this all of the time with our involvement in the TeleManagement Forum. We are trying to develop open source reference implementations for a variety of TMF interfaces, but we get resistance at sharing them, since those interfaces are considered TMF intellectual property. I won’t say that the process is hopeless, not at all, but it is a struggle.

The second one involved a large application currently managed by a branch of the US Government that they are in the process of making open source, and they wanted input on how to get more community involvement.

Interesting questions, but nothing I really wanted to spend time talking about. I was there to get ideas on how to stay true to our open source ideals and yet make lots of money. I believe the answer lies in the fact that many open source projects are large, powerful and complex, and you can monetize making it simpler for people (i.e. SaaS, etc.).

So you can imagine my surprise that two of the people I met at this “open source” conference, and had a lot of fun with, were from Cisco and Adobe. I also met the legal counsel for one of our largest customers, a guy from Amazon that used to work down the road at Red Hat, and the woman who was ultimately responsible for nuking my paper submission to OSCON.

In addition I got to see some familiar faces, including Jono Bacon, Erica Brescia, Mark Hinkle and Ross Turk.

But cool people cannot compensate for the universal truth that panel discussions stink. There were a lot of them. And the whole tone of the conference was aimed at the “Go Big or Go Home” crowd, of which I’m not a part. This doesn’t mean I have in any way limited my vision for OpenNMS, but getting bigger for just the sake of size is just not me. I want to build a company that lasts, and through keeping a large and growing customer base happy, make a lot of money. The “Go Big or Go Home” folks seem attracted to models in which rapid growth is the only goal, and if the initial investment doesn’t fund it, future growth is taken out on the backs of customers (<cough>Groupon<cough>). I just found little I could use at the conference.

For example, at Friday’s breakfast I ended up at the same table with Martin Mikos. He has made a personal fortune under the banner of open source, but he keeps confusing proprietary software (with an open source component) with open source software. Through his leadership, MySQL ultimately ended up being owned by Oracle, and the inability of Eucalyptus to understand the difference led to the OpenStack fork. But what am I going to do, ambush him at breakfast? Not only would that not be cool, he would not care, and I seriously believe he is unaware of the difference. I think that was true of a lot of the attendees. To many, making money is more important than building something to last, although making something that lasts does not preclude making money.

I did try to introduce myself to Rod Johnson, but never got the chance. I was hoping he’d get a laugh out of this old picture I have of Ben Hale taken during one of our early Dev-Jam conferences, back when SpringSource was called Interface21.

I did have to leave in the middle of the conference to head into the city (the main reason I was out there), so it is possible that had I stayed for the whole event I might have gotten some answers to my questions and had a better overall experience. But I think overall the divide was too great between my experience with open source and most of the people there.

With all of the recent press about Red Hat becoming a billion dollar company, I can’t help but imagine how different that company would have been had it been headquartered in Silicon Valley. The Think Tank conference seems to primarily represent Valley thinking, and while that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, it’s not for me.

I think there are better ways.