Conferences

Europe 2010 – Management World Day 4

Posted on by tarus

The last day of Management World started off with some bad news. It turns out that our catalyst did not win the Excellence Award, instead it was for another project that BT sponsored.

I did try my damnedest to verify that we had won before posting, but the TMForum’s Twitter feed was no help and the web site just had the BT logo and not the name of the project listed for the winner. The executive who accepted the award referenced us and the BT employees in the booth thought we had won as well.

One funny thing is that because of this misunderstanding, the booth saw a tremendous amount of extra traffic as everyone else thought we were the winner, too. I guess it worked out that it wasn’t sorted until the last day.

For the most part I enjoyed the conference, and the term “cloud” was used correctly most of the time. I also got to spend time with Alex Finger, one of the people we worked with at Swisscom to deploy a large OpenNMS solution.

He had an interesting blog post on the misuse of the term “cloud” from none other than HP. They wrote:

By utilising Cloud Computing your mobile device will become your photo ID, your passport, your library card … and it probably won’t be called a phone anymore …

No, no, no, no … by utilizing “the Internet” your mobile device blah blah blah. The Internet is not the Cloud, despite Microsoft and their Visio icon. Everyone is so desperate to be associated with cloud computing that they will use it whenever possible, although it has a specific meaning.

In our catalyst at the show we demonstrated an integration where extra computing power was turned on and off based on need. That’s cloud computing – treating traditional network resources as if they were utilities.

As Alex points out, hardware companies like HP desperately want to be associated with cloud because “If the service and the computing power are not visible anymore to the users … who cares then about the hardware vendor?”

Good point.

Europe 2010 – Management World Day 3

Posted on by tarus

I got a late start to the conference on Wednesday. Since I have Internet access at l’apartment there is nothing preventing me from working, and we’ve been extremely busy lately. It’s all good, and much better than having too much time on our hands.

I’ve also been writing a lot. This week alone I filled out a long survey, wrote a 2000 word open source business article for a website in Canada, and made time to complete another long survey as part of the Robert X. Cringely Not in Silicon Valley Startup Tour.

The idea is to create a reality television show profiling 24 startup companies which will air on a cable television network. They’ve had over 400 nominations (ours came from Tanner Lovelace who I first met working at Oculan) so we have, what, a 6% chance out of the box of making it? I hope my answers to their questions upped that a bit.

You can check out our nomination and comment on it if you like. I did mention that I live on a horse farm so since he’s bringing his kids maybe visiting the farm will be an extra draw. Plenty of RV parking, too.

I arrived at the conference early afternoon and spent most of the day chatting with people about OpenNMS and our work at the TMForum. Did I mention that this is a suit-heavy conference?

I was even wearing one.

I’d like to be able to point you to some information about our open source interface project, called JOSIF, but all of that is locked behind a membership wall. One of the frustrating things about trying to bring open source concepts to the TMForum is that they are very conscious of intellectual property of any kind and trying to free up some of our information is a bit of a struggle.

In the evening we met up with some people from Swisscom in Bern and went to a delightful restaurant called Le Maison de Marie. We then walked back to the apartment along the waterfront.

As I looked out and over the lights of Nice, I had this one surreal moment where it hit me that, although I work in open source (which is often associated with “cheap” and bare bones), here I was, a country boy from North Carolina, walking along the French Riviera on a warm spring evening.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Europe 2010 – Management World Days 1 and 2

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The reason I’m in Nice this week is to attend the Telemanagement Forum’s annual Management World conference. Dr. Craig Gallen has been leading the OpenNMS involvement with this organization for many years now, and we have been trying to introduce open source development concepts into the highest levels of telecom carriers and those companies that support them.

Most of that effort has gone into the TMForum’s Interface Program (TIP). The goal of TIP is to create permissively licensed open source code to implement the interfaces defined in the NGOSS specification. On our first day at the conference (Monday) there was a long status meeting that we attended. Well, I left after the first hour and a half. I now have a greater appreciation for the work Craig is doing. (grin)

Today, the main part of the conference officially started. This is a serious conference – lots of people in suits (including me) and a very high level of execution. A tremendous amount of money goes into the signs, banners, food, etc., that I don’t see at any other show.

Today is also when they announce the winners of the TMForum Excellence Awards. The OpenNMS Group was nominated in the “Leadership” category but we didn’t make the finalist cut. However, we were also involved in a project lead by the BT Group that was a finalist in the “Innovation” category.

We didn’t win that either – although it was announced as if we did. The confusion arose because the BT group had two catalysts in the show, and the executive who accepted the award mentioned the Cloud Service Broker. Oh well.

We spent most of the day on the third level in “Forumville”. It is a tradition at TMForum events for members to showcase proofs of concept. Called “catalysts,” they range from mockups to systems that are nearly production ready.

We were involved in a catalyst called the “Cloud Services Broker”.

A “broker” is usually someone that facilitates an exchange of goods or services. For example, in the US most people receive health insurance from their employers. Those that work for The OpenNMS Group are no different. Rather than search out all possible options and trying to determine the best fit, I contacted a broker who then examined our needs and matched us with a insurance company. When that company raised their rates a few years later, she worked to find us alternatives.

What BT aims to do is to act as a broker for cloud services. They would make the ordering process easy and then match a client’s needs to the best vendor. Should situations change in the future, they could facilitate a change of service or a switch to another vendor. They would also make it easy for ISVs to add their products to the ordering system.

Here is a diagram:

There were several companies involved in the solution. The assembly and lifecycle management of cloud products is performed by Square Hoop, while technical assembly is delivered by Comptel. Comptel also provided the portal by which cloud products are ordered. BT provides trusted deployment of the solution to the right cloud service providers, and assures that all governance requirements are met. Infonova provides management charging models (billing), while OpenNMS delivers the monitoring function.

One of the scenarios demonstrated in the catalyst was the ability to dynamically allocate extra compute resources in a “burst” fashion. In this example, a web site that takes orders for computer parts desires a service level of less than 1 second for the website to respond to requests.

They have a couple of servers running their commerce application, fronted by a load balancing device.

When this system was provisioned, messages were sent to OpenNMS to automatically monitor this service and to put certain service-related thresholds in place.

When the number of visitors to the website is increased, OpenNMS detects that it is now taking longer than one second to respond to queries. Since this is to be expected from time to time, no action is taken until this condition persists for several minutes.

At that point a message is sent from OpenNMS to BT’s system, which then automatically allocates more servers and notifies the load balancer to start sending traffic to the new resources. This results in a decrease in response times to well within acceptable limits.

Here’s Craig demonstrating this at the show:

OpenNMS, designed as a network management application platform, was the perfect choice since there were a number of integration points to allow BT to both add, delete and change what is being monitored as well as to receive important information back from the system with a minimum of integration effort. The OpenNMS code was not changed for this demonstration.

The best part of the whole thing is that the solution is close to production ready. Craig and I were chatting about this, and we thought wouldn’t it be cool if BT were able to offer OpenNMS as a brokered solution? Since BT owns the network that these customers use, they could spin up a VM, load it with OpenNMS, then open a VPN to the customer’s network. Throw in auto-discovery and a client could have a management solution up and running in less than an hour.

The idea of being able to make the purchase and deployment of cloud services easier for both end users and those that supply the services is pretty innovative, and I think BT has a real opportunity here.

Europe 2010 – OUCE Day 2

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I am writing this from the JAL lounge at the Frankfurt airport, waiting on my flight to London. It took awhile but I finally found that they have wired internet (RJ45s at certain seats) which is unusual but totally understandable. Good thing I aways carry a cable.

Yesterday was the second and final day of the OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe. While Day One was focused on the OpenNMS user community, the second was led by key members of the development team to focus on the application.

But before the workshops started we saw a keynote from Uwe Bergmann, the CEO of Nethinks, and how Nethinks is using OpenNMS to meet its clients’ needs. The OpenNMS Group and Nethinks have an interesting history. We got off on the wrong foot when one of our folks back in 2008 pointed me to an article on a German IT website about a product called MONET. MONET is based on OpenNMS, but includes integration with other open source tools. Unfortunately the article didn’t make any reference to this fact. This happened right when we were trying to deal with a company that was improperly using our code and I was hyper sensitive about it, and so I thought it had happened again.

This was not the case (MONET is distributed in accordance with the license) but since Nethinks had obviously seen the value that OpenNMS provides, it was the start of a good partnership. Nethinks sponsored last year’s conference and once again did most of the heavy lifting for this one.

Uwe discussed how OpenNMS was used to solve various problems that his clients experienced. Once the videos are online, it will be worth checking out.

After the initial talk, the conference broke into two tracks of workshops.

The first one I attended was Antonio Russo’s discussion of the new mapping features in OpenNMS.

I have never liked maps, but certain users, usually management, almost require them. Being an open source project, I’m willing to entertain any new feature in OpenNMS as long as it is good, and maps are no exception. But after hearing about all of the new stuff in our maps, I actually got excited about them and can’t wait to play with them on our own system.

At the OpenNMS Group we have a very flat organizational structure. However, since we are growing so fast, I am spending more and more of my time doing company administration. For this trip I’ve turned it into a joke. For example, when I got us upgraded to business class I told Ben “see, this is for management”. If I misspoke about something related to OpenNMS and one of my guys corrected me, I’d just say “pardon me, I’m management”.

So when I left Antonio’s presentation and was going on and on about how I liked the new maps, Ben said, “Gee, you really are management”.

(grin)

Speaking of Ben, his was the next talk I attended. I don’t write much code anymore, and some of the recent changes, such as the migration to git, are still new to me. Having spent most of my life with this idea that there was one and only one repository for a particular piece of code, the highly distributed nature of git is something I’m still getting my brain around, but I asked a lot of questions and things are clearer now.

The final workshop of the day was Ronny Trommer’s presentation on the OpenNMS integration with JasperReports. As “management” this was also exciting to me, as now we can produce beautiful reports from any information that is available from the database.

We use the “community” edition of the Jasper server, and outside of flash and commercial support I am not sure what the “enterprise” version gets you, but it seems like the free version is pretty feature rich. The only thing that it doesn’t give us is the ability to import information from the RRD files but we’re planning on adding that and contributing it back to their project.

After the workshops were over it was like no one wanted to leave. We talked for at least an hour more, but then people started trickling out to catch trains, etc. A group of us who stayed around walked through the red light district to a Japanese steakhouse that was recommended for dinner.

It was a great conference and everyone who came seemed to get a lot out of it.

Europe 2010 – OUCE Day 1

Posted on by tarus

Although it is cold and raining in Frankfurt, the atmosphere at the second annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe is pretty sunny. While there are less people than we had last year, the attendees are stellar and I believe everyone is having a good time.

Once again Nethinks has done a great job with the conference. We have two rooms, each with a projector, flip chart and drink cabinet, with one room in between for breaks, coffee and snacks.

Uwe started things off with a short introduction, then I did about 90 minutes discussing the current state of the OpenNMS project. I focused on two themes: OpenNMS as an application platform and the OpenNMS community. At the end I was able to present both Ronny Trommer and Jay Aras with their green polo shirts, which was the highlight of the talk for me.

We then took a break for lunch (the hotel has a wonderful buffet) and the afternoon started with technical discussions on how users were working with OpenNMS.

Since a number of people from The OpenNMS Group are here, I wanted to make sure that at least one of us was in every session, so while I wish I could have seen both tracks, I only got to see half of them. They were all recorded, so I plan to watch them once the videos are posted.

I started with Christoph Lagemann’s presentation on how his company uses OpenNMS. They started with OpenNMS 1.2 many years ago, so it was nice to hear what they thought of its progression over time, as well as areas for improvement.

This was followed by a discussion from Jens Michelsons on the OpenNMS notification system. He covered the basics but ended the talk with several examples of unique ways to use OpenNMS in order to send alerts. This is the thing I love the most about our project – by focusing on building a platform versus an application people are free to come up with new ways of using it that the designers never conceived.

The final talk was by Markus Schneider on his OpenUMR project. He has integrated OpenNMS with Microsoft’s OpsManager. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although being Windows focused it wasn’t a fan favorite for this conference crowd. (grin)

At some point, my friend Neils brought me stroopwafles. He knows my weakness for them.

Then it was time for beer and socializing. This was followed by an evening event at a local African restaurant. It was delicious food (you eat from shared plates using your hands and a type of bread) and since we basically took over the restaurant it was a great way to end the evening.

As I watched everyone interacting and having a good time, I couldn’t help but wonder at the power of free and open source software to bring people together. Here we had people from 10 countries laughing, talking and breaking bread together, and it was as if there were no national boundaries. We talked about technology, politics, art, music and everyone had something to learn and something to share.

If you haven’t experienced it, it is hard to describe, but for me it removes any doubt that my dedication to OpenNMS has been the right decision.

Europe 2010 – Arriving in Frankfurt

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The trip from London to Frankfurt was uneventful. Due to high winds our flight was delayed about an hour, but I used the time to catch up on some sleep.

Once in Frankfurt I was happy to find my luggage had made the trip as well. Ben and I met up with Antonio and we took a cab to the OpenNMS conference hotel.

We got our rooms and then it was time for reunions with old friends and meeting new ones. Alon Rubinstein brought two coworkers in from Israel, and Uwe and the Nethinks team were also there. The group of us wandered off to find a place to eat and catch up.

Alex Hoogerhuis showed up, but unfortunately he became ill and didn’t join us. I was chatting with him on IRC this morning and I believe he is just going to head back home to Norway. I hope he feels better, especially since I am to join him in a week (grin).

Frankfurt is an interesting city. As the financial capital of the Eurozone, you see some interesting art:

I joked with Uwe and asked which star was Greece, to which he replied “the fallen one”.

(grin)

We got back to the hotel around 9:30 and I called it an early night. Tomorrow the conference starts and I still have a lot to do.

Upcoming OpenNMS Events

Posted on by tarus

Things are really heating up around here, and there are a number of OpenNMS events happening over the summer. Here is a list of them and I hope to see all three of my readers at at least one.

The OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe (6-7 May 2010 – Frankfurt, Germany)

This two-day event brings together both OpenNMS users and developers for two days of seminars and training. I can’t think of a better way to quickly get up to speed on the application. I’ll be giving a talk on the upcoming OpenNMS 1.8 release. Registration is still open.

The TeleManagement Forum’s Management World 2010 (18-20 May 2010 – Nice, France)

OpenNMS has partnered with BT for the Cloud Service Broker (CSB) catalyst to demonstrate a proof of concept for a trusted cloud management platform. OpenNMS will form the management piece integrating with BT’s cloud services, Square Hoop’s configuration system and Infonova’s billing software.

Southeast LinuxFest (11-13 June 2010 – Spartanburg, SC, USA)

The OpenNMS Group is a Diamond sponsor of this great conference on free and open source software. I’ll be speaking and we’ll have a booth there where you can meet some of the team and see the latest in OpenNMS.

Conferenza Italiana sul Software Libero (11-12 June 2010 – Cagliari, Italy)

If you happen to be in Italy and can’t make SELF, that same weekend Antonio Russo will be doing a presentation on OpenNMS at the Italian Free Software Conference. Antonio is an OGP member and a frequent contributor to the project.

O’Reilly Open Source Conference (19-23 July 2010 – Portland, OR, USA)

I’ll be returning to OSCON after a year’s absence (Dave and Matt went last year) and I look forward to this premier free and open source software event (especially since it is returning to Portland, one of my favorite places to visit). I’ll be speaking as well as attending, so drop me a note if you plan to be there.

Dev-Jam 2010 (26-30 July 2010 – Minneapolis, MN, USA)

The fifth annual OpenNMS Developer’s Conference returns to the University of Minnesota for a week of sheer OpenNMS geekdom. We take over the large Club Room at Yudof Hall to code, determine the direction of OpenNMS, socialize, etc. The schedule is made up as we go, but the focus is on both solidifying our community and making OpenNMS the de facto network management application platform. Everyone with an interest in OpenNMS is welcome, especially if an immersive week with fellow geeks appeals to you. It’s one of my favorite times of the year.

There are a couple of other events coming up but since they haven’t yet been confirmed I left them off. I’ll post more as time gets closer.

2010 Open Source Business Conference – Day Two

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My second day at the OSBC started off pretty hectic. I had a number of work related things to take care of so I missed the morning keynotes. Both of them seemed interesting, but it wasn’t meant to be (on the upside we closed a lot of business today).

I showed up in time for the first set of breakout sessions, and the first one I attended was entitled “Tactics and Metrics for Scaling an Open-Source Company” by Rob Bearden of Benchmark Capital. Now this was what I was expecting from this conference: defining open source business as open core. Having an “enterprise” commercial software version of your open source project was taken as a given. I thought it was a telling sign when the speaker kept introducing people from the VC-backed open core world (one guy from MySQL, another from Alfresco, a couple from Pentaho) but he had to ask Jono Bacon to identify himself.

VC firms are usually not concerned with building lasting companies but instead they focus on building perceived value so that they can exit in five years or less. This talk was much more about downloads and marketing than scaling to meet customer demand. I don’t really have a problem with the VC business model, but it causes my knickers to bunch when they drape the “open source” flag on it. Let’s be honest – the sale of MySQL to Sun did a lot for the investors of MySQL, but was it really worth US$1 billion for the buyer? If the focus hadn’t been so much on the big exit, would the MySQL community be better off and less fractured? That sale is a great thing to tout if you’re making investments, but don’t lecture me on value as a whole.

Of course it didn’t help that the whole discussion was peppered with buzzwords like “e-properties” and “onboarding”. And it consisted of Powerpoint bullets.

I did introduce myself to James Dixon of Pentaho. I like reading his stuff even if I don’t agree with most of it.

I decided to follow Jono over to his presentation on the role of the Community Manager. As the most well-known community manager in all of open source, his presentation was both interesting and insightful. It wasn’t a discussion of how to build a community (for that get his book) but instead focused on the qualities to look for in the person you want to act as the liaison between your company and your community.

One phrase he used that I liked a lot is that your community manager has to be able to “participate faithfully”. I think it is dreadfully important that the community manager of any project should have some sort of credibility with the community. In addition, he stressed the manager’s “ability to do” – meaning that the position can’t just be a figurehead but has to be vested with influence. Awhile ago I overheard one community manager respond to a technical question about his product with “I’m just the guy who orders the T-shirts”. I think he was selling himself short but that is a horrible thing to have to say.

He also introduced me to the term “read vs. write” communities. There are a number of communities that are simply consumers of a particular thing. Take Star Trek fans for example. They can be rabid in their love of the show but they really don’t add anything to it. Open source communities, on the other hand, can influence, sometimes greatly, the project to which they belong. These “write” communities have to be treated differently than their “read” counterparts.

He also stressed that the role of “community” manager has a lot in common with traditional managers. When I managed people my job was to protect and isolate them from the crap from above. I wanted my team to focus on helping customers and solving problems – not worrying about politics. A good community manager should do the same, especially since most open source communities are volunteer. Add a dash of bureaucracy and watch those people flee.

Plus – his talk was free of Powerpoint bullets.

Right after the talk the lady sitting next to me introduced herself. It turns out she was Tara Spalding, the head of marketing for Groundwork Open Source. I was impressed that she treated me so civilly after I really bashed her MonitoringForge efforts. I wanted to stress to her that part of my issues deal with years of baggage over Groundwork (when they started out they represented the worst in fauxpen source) and in part my jealousy that they managed to get and run through tens of millions of dollars in investment (what magic I could work with just a fraction of that money). She stressed to me that their efforts are truly aimed at providing a forum for open source monitoring as independent as possible from Groundwork itself, but like a lot of open source efforts, someone has to foot the bill for the servers, maintenance and site design so they stepped up. My attitude softened quite a bit after our conversation, and although I am not quite ready to endorse it, I’ll be keeping a much less cynical eye on the site.

Jono was talking to some folks from Rackspace, so I butted in to the conversation. They had a group at the OSBC as well as a number of people at the cloud conference going on at the same time across town. We chatted about their new data center going up in Chicago (I, of course, provisioned the OpenNMS servers there) and their amazing growth in general.

Jono and I then went down to lunch and spent an hour talking about a huge number of things. He showed me the new artwork and design in Ubuntu (trés pretty) and at one point his wife, Erica Brescia (CEO of BitRock) stopped by. He pointed out that if you google “Erica Brescia” and click on images, my picture of the two of them at LugRadio Live in San Francisco is like the third hit.

Let’s make it the first hit, shall we? Everyone link to that picture and put “Erica Brescia” next to it.

Erica Brescia, Erica Brescia, Erica Brescia. Take that Google.

Toward the end of the meal I got to meet Stephen Walli. I’d never met the subject of a User Friendly cartoon before. He’s a great guy and if you ever meet him ask him to tell you the “yes, but it’s dark and she’s been drinking” story.

The afternoon session started at two and I decided to see Jay Lyman of the 451 Group talk about the cost benefits of open source. One thing that caused me to raise my eyebrows was a slide about where the perceived cost savings were. Licensing costs were number one, of course, but number two was license management.

I remember from my OpenView days that moving OpenView from one server to another often took a day or two just to navigate the bureaucracy of getting a new server-specific license key. The fact that it was such a concern for organizations, however, came as a surprise.

My next talk was on open source license compatibility given by Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center. She represented us during our time of troubles, and it is always nice to see her again. As we were talking a friend of hers came up and gave her a hug. I looked down at his badge to find I was standing next to Jeremy Allison.

Cool.

In the span of four talks I had gone from open core to mainstream open source to free software.

The OSBC had a legal track in its program, and most of the talks were focused on how to defend yourself when the SFLC comes a callin’. It was neat to see the other side of the story presented in an entertaining manner by Karen, with the phrase “free software” repeated over and over again.

Now I am not a lawyer but I have more than a passing acquaintance with open source licensing. One thing people don’t realize is that if you distribute open source software (well, specifically GPL software) you are required to distribute the source at the same time. If you choose not to you are making a promise to provide the source to all comers for the next three years. Seriously – if you hand out Linux CDs at the local computer club you technically have to be willing to hand out source CDs as well. The media has to be the same. You can’t hand out binary CDs and tell people to get the source from a website, since that person may not have access to the web (think of a remote place in Africa as an example). Since we only distribute OpenNMS via the web it is okay that the source is also distributed via the web, but in other cases the binary and source media must match.

Karen pointed out that the best thing to do is to ship the source when you originally distribute the software, since your requirements under the license are satisfied immediately, but the second best thing is to have an easily accessible place for people to get it. In any case it is important that you respond to requests for code in a timely manner (and having a centralized repository makes this much easier).

Speaking of timeliness, she also addressed why the SFLC is quick to investigate license violations. Quite simply, licenses would be useless without enforcement. But she also noted that the creators of free and open software want people to use it, so they are much more focused on compliance than punishment (my words, not hers).

It was a good presentation (and Karen had a splitting headache during it but it didn’t show) but as I was in a room full of lawyers I can’t let go without at least one lawyer joke. In the breakout rooms there were two sets of doors. There was a pair near the speaker podium and a pair at the back of the room. The pair at the back was marked by a sign listing the speakers, and in every room I was in over the two days this worked perfectly (people came in the proper door). During Karen’s talk not one but two people came in the door right in front of her, which I found amusing.

I was pretty much done after her talk. I changed into jeans and headed to the airport, enjoying the unusually warm weather in San Francisco. It was a fun conference, and at the moment I will probably come back next year.

But I don’t expect to be a speaker. (grin)

2010 Open Source Business Conference – Day One

Posted on by tarus

I am currently in San Francisco attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). While the conference has been around for awhile, I have never had a desire to attend before since people have told me it is more like the Open Core Business Conference. Also, it was founded my Matt Asay who nurses a strong dislike for OpenNMS (for proof just check out his negative article on us and our BOSSIE last year which is based on quotes that don’t seem to exist in the original article).

We have a standing rule at the OpenNMS Group that we will pay the expenses for any employee who gets a paper accepted at a conference, so I dutifully submitted two talks. The first was my ever evolving “So You Think You Want to Start and Open Source Business?” presentation, but since I was pretty certain that would be shot down, I also suggested another presentation where two of our “Ultra” support customers, Rackspace and New Edge, could talk about how they use the OpenNMS management application platform in their business.

Both were shot down.

In any case, the number of open source shows is small and the number of people I wanted to meet that were attending this one was large, so I decided to come anyway. Here are my thoughts on day one.

As someone who runs an open source business, I figured that the conference would be aimed at people like me. Instead, looking at the agenda the conference should be renamed the Open Source in Business Conference since, this year at least, it is much more about using open source than basing a company on it.

The first keynote was delivered by Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. I am an unabashed fan boy of Red Hat, and now it seems I have a slight man crush on Jim.

This was the first time I had seen him in person. I met his predecessor, Matt Szulik, on a number of occasions, and Szulik always struck me as the somber corporate type. Jim, on the other hand, reminds me more of the people I usually meet in open source. He’s very energetic and more importantly, he gets it. Even though he came from Delta Airlines, an industry very different from open source software, he demonstrates a strong understanding of the value it provides.

He doesn’t sell on price, but power. Open source is not about saving money but it is about innovation. His customers have a lot of innovation to do within their own businesses, and open source is the best way to get that done. Of course price is a factor, but it isn’t the main one.

He did point out that Red Hat is the largest “pure-play” open source company. I hate the fact that he even had to say “pure-play,” but there are people that want to blur the definition of an open source company to include the likes of Google and Microsoft, so I was happy he went out of his way to mention it.

He also touched on a theme that I would see throughout the day. It’s this idea of applying open source development concepts to other issues. He ended the talk with a discussion of the new opensource.com site which exists not only to discuss open source software but to apply the “power of participation” to solving other problems.

He won me over by not simply reading a list of Powerpoint bullets off the screen. His slides were images and phrases that complimented the talk but weren’t the center of it. I was impressed.

This was followed by a panel discussion that included Tim Yeaton (CEO of Black Duck), Larry Augustin (The Dark Lord of Open Source), Dries Buytaert (Founder of Drupal) and Jim Whitehurst. It was moderated by Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, and since VCs are the driving force behind open core business models I figured this is where I would start to get my hackles up.

I was wrong.

I hate panel discussions, but this one was pretty good. They reviewed a survey that was sent out that explored various aspects of open source adoption, and they compared it to previous years.

Jim won me over again when, on one slide discussing open source business models, there was quite a difference between it and the year before (and that slide was different than the year before it). He said that this “moving of the bars” represented that people were still experimenting with the best ways to make money on open source and this was a good thing. At OpenNMS our business plan changes quite frequently as we continually tune our offerings to our customer needs, so I agreed with him.

Larry even impressed me when he stated that he hates to compete on price. OpenNMS is not the cheapest solution for everyone, but it is the best solution for many large enterprises and carriers based on power, flexibility, scalability and, yes, total cost of ownership. But if one expects a bargain basement solution they will be disappointed.

Then he lost me when he confused dual licensing with open core licensing. Dual Licensing is when 100% of the code is available under both an open source license and a proprietary one (like our Powered By OpenNMS program) whereas Open Core licensing is where some of the code is open but a good portion of it is not.

One reason I hate panel discussions is that it is hard for the audience to get involved. At one point Dries pointed out that there are over 5000 plugins for Drupal. I think that’s great, but I wanted to ask what is the difference between an open source project and its plugins versus a closed source project with an open API and its plugins (like Facebook). Plugins alone can’t be the reason to choose a solution.

The next to the last slide discussed “cool” open source projects, in that new fancy way where the word with the most attention is larger than the surrounding words (I need to know the technical name for this, so if anyone knows it, drop me a note or comment). Drupal was very large and it was interesting to see Nagios up there, too. OpenNMS was represented, but in the smallest font. I should point out that Apache and Thunderbird were the same font size as us, so I’m not too disappointed.

The last question was phrased “What Percent of Purchased Software Will Be Open in the Next 5 Years?” I thought it was silly to talk about “purchasing” open source software. It still shows the open core mentality that software has to be purchased. Sure, they could mean services purchased around open source software, but it wasn’t phrased that way. Open source is so much more about building an innovative solution than software licenses that I wish they would have recognized that in their question.

The next keynote was delivered by Bob Sutor of IBM. He started off with a disclaimer where the words “ideology” and “philosophy” were surrounded by one of those red “not” circles with the bar across it. Anytime someone tells me I need to ignore open source ideology and philosophy usually means they are about to try to redefine them. My guard was up.

It didn’t need to be. His talk, despite being Powerpoint bullet lists, was good. He pointed out that as a percentage of overall software used, open source is still pretty small. He touched a painful point with our project when he mentioned that the quality of documentation is often a reflection on the quality of the software. I don’t agree with it fully but there is a nugget of truth to it. He then took a stab at the open core crowd by differentiating between open source and “coding in public”.

It was interesting to contrast him with Jim Whitehurst. He definitely has more of a corporate demeanor and a wicked talent for talking about other companies without naming them. He also talked about how companies that modify open source in house should contribute back to the community since the cost of propagating changes to the code over time erodes the value of using it.

He didn’t need the disclaimer.

That was the end of the morning keynotes. My first breakout session was Matt Aslett’s talk on The Evolution of Open Source Business Strategies.

Matt was one of the people I came to the conference to meet, and I enjoyed his talk. He works for the 451 Group which published a report in 2008 entitled “Open Source is Not a Business Model“.

They took a lot of heat from the open source community as the word “not” was perceived as a knock against open source in general. It reminded me of Leonard Nimoy’s book “I Am Not Spock” which got him labeled as a Star Trek hater. Never use the word “not” in a title if you can help it.

At OpenNMS our mission is to help customers, have fun doing it, and make money. Our business model is based on services, and open source is simply a strategy. In his talk he discusses a number of open source strategies, from pure play companies like ours up through open core and the obligatory “cloud” reference.

He did stress the difference between dual licensing and open core, and he used OpenNMS as a case study for both a pure open source services company and dual licensing. It was a good talk and nice to finally meet him in person.

I met a number of other cool people. Jay Lyman, who also works for the 451 Group, is giving a talk on Thursday. I stopped by the Microsoft booth to chat with Brenton Phillips to thank him for our MSDN subscription. We had a nice talk about the difference between open source companies and those that use open source.

Next to their booth was the Red Hat booth. Jason Hibbets was there representing opensource.com. I also met Daniel Chalef, the CEO of KnowledgeTree which is based out of Raleigh as well.

I got introduced to an open source document management company called Nuxeo. It is a pure-play open source company based out of France (the French don’t have any trouble differentiating between open source and open core). I met Cheryl McKinnon, their Chief Marketing Officer, and I need to check out their project (us pure play folks need to stick together).

The final keynote of the day was a presentation by Tim O’Reilly. This is the second time I have seen him speak (the first was as OSCON a few years ago). Tim is so far ahead of the curve it takes me awhile to digest what he says. My initial instinct is often to disagree with him, but then I realize that he tends to be talking about something much different than what I think he is talking about.

This lack of comprehension could be a weakness on my part, but since the first audience question was “hey, could you connect the dots for me?” I wasn’t the only one. Despite that, he is an engaging speaker.

His talk was basically how low cost “sensor” hardware (such as smartphones and other devices) are going to feed raw data up to large, centralized databases (the cloud) where the web will enable us to access rich content applications. He talked about a weight scale he owns that is wi-fi enabled so he can track his weight (about 181 pounds, if you care), as well as a device from Phillips that measures his daily activity.

Then he showed a somewhat darker side of all this data. There is a project in the UK called AMEE that collects energy use data in order to calculate carbon footprints. They have a number of sensors that measure, say, electricity consumption, and it is sensitive enough that they can pinpoint not only when a particular appliance was used, such as a dishwasher, but also the make and model of the appliance. While AMEE’s motives seem benign, it demonstrated how this data can pose a serious threat to privacy (and I should note that their raw data is openly available).

Tim focused on the rise of such databases, and how the bigger the database, the better it works. The owners of this data (such as Google and Facebook) are thus in a pretty powerful position. It severely limits the ability for others to enter the market, and easy entry and exit is a cornerstone of functioning markets.

But I was having a problem understanding how the call for “open data” related to open source. I think open data is one of the more pressing technology issues facing our society today, but I couldn’t see how that was relevant to my business.

Tim kind of brought it together with the concept that these growing data sinks, such as Google, are becoming impossible to compete with. Google has a business advantage to keeping the data closed. With Google having something like 10 million servers, it would take a huge investment just to get started, and a traditional competition model fails.

Thus the only way to prevent putting the best databases in the hands of a few corporations is to adopt an open source attitude. He demonstrated this by searching for the Palace Hotel (the site of the conference) on a number of open source sites, such as OpenStreetMap. He couldn’t find it. However, a site like Yelp has a lot of information on the hotel. Wouldn’t it be nice if Yelp was able to share its location database with OpenStreetMap? Not all of its data, of course. Yelp would keep the reviews, etc., but OpenStreetMap could reciprocate by linking searches back to Yelp.

This idea of reciprocity is core to the open source philosophy, and it is probably the only option available to bring any sort of openness and competition to the data market.

His talk made me think, which is always a good thing.

Speaking of good things, I was pretty happy with the first day of the conference. There was little in the way of people trying to redefine “open source” and a lot of focus on the value that it brings. That doesn’t mean I trust or agree with everyone who spoke, but I was surprised at how the conference didn’t try to hit me over the head with the idea that the only way to be successful in an open source business is to sell software. On a side note, this week our corporate taxes were due and I’m willing to bet I paid more in taxes than most of these VC-backed open core companies made in profits last year.

The day ended with a cocktail reception. As a final note, if you ever attend a conference in California with an open bar, offer to tip your server. While they can’t display a “tip jar” they are allowed to accept tips, and in the spirit of reciprocity a nice tip will get you extra good service. Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, a little Jameson and ginger ale was in order. (grin)

Upcoming OpenNMS Events

Posted on by tarus

Lots of events going on in OpenNMS-land. I thought I’d list a few here:

  • Early bird registration for the OpenNMS Users Conference to be held in Frankfurt, Germany on May 6th and 7th ends tomorrow. This is the place to be to hear all about OpenNMS, and early registration can save attendees €60.
  • Next week I’ll be at the Computerworld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Drop me a note if you are going and want to meet up.
  • On April 10th, Jeff Gehlbach will be speaking at the Texas Linux Fest 2010 on using OpenNMS in enterprise environments. If you have seen any of his OpenNMS and Asterisk presentations in the past, you know how good they are and won’t want to miss this one.
  • We once again have training scheduled in metropolitan Pittsboro, NC, USA for the week of the 19th of April. These classes are both a lot of fun and the best way to get started with OpenNMS.
  • David Hustace, Craig Gallen and myself will be attending the TeleManagement Forum’s ManagementWorld conference in Nice, France, on 18-20 May. Again, if you use or are interested in OpenNMS and you’ll be at the conference, please let us know. We’d love to meet you.
  • And finally, The OpenNMS Group is a platinum sponsor of the Southeastern Linuxfest to be held in South Carolina the weekend of June 12th. Since this is close expect a lot of the OpenNMS crew to be there, and I’ve submitted a couple of talks but haven’t heard back if they have been accepted.

Of course, I’m able to talk, in depth and at length, about OpenNMS pretty much anywhere and anytime (grin). Hope to meet you in person soon.