Internet of Thiings

“Help Me” Easy Button

Posted on by Tarus

Ever since my parents got older, I’ve be wanting to create a tech company focused solely on making technology available for the elderly in a fashion that is easier for them to understand. Perhaps this will all go away with AI and digital assistants, or when my generation that grew up with tech gets older, but I have watched them struggle sometimes with mobile phones and TV remotes, even ones that are supposed to be simple, and I realize there is probably a market for such solutions.

While I don’t have capital for such an undertaking, I do have access to open source software and hardware, and I have a device idea that shouldn’t require heroic effort to create.

Remember the “Easy Button” from Staples?

Staples Easy Button

What I want is something about the same size, but when you press it, it will send a notice to an app on my phone.

My mother died last year and we recently bought a new home in part because it has a basement apartment where my father can live. He will have his own space but we’ll be close enough to help him out if he needs it.

The idea for this button came to me when I was thinking about what would happen if he needed some help but for whatever reason he couldn’t either call out so that we could hear him or get to a phone. Unless he was severely incapacitated he should be able to press a big button, and since I almost always have my phone with me all I would need would be an app that could send me a notice.

Since my three readers are very smart (and not to mention devilishly attractive) you have probably thought about existing services (remember the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” Life Call ad from 15 years ago?) but older people can be extremely proud and they hate being reminded of their age. I’m pretty certain my father would resist carrying around a device on a lanyard but he wouldn’t mind having a button nearby “just in case”.

The feature set would be pretty short:

  • A big button (‘natch)
  • Some indication that the button has been pressed (light or buzzer)
  • Settings:
    • A way to name the button
    • Configure the Wi-Fi connection
    • Configure a list of users to contact when the button is pressed

For ease of use the first generation of such a device would not be battery powered but if it was there would need to be a way to make sure the battery was charged.

While I have worked with Raspberry Pi boards I have not done anything with the Pi Zero, but I assume this would be a perfect application for it. The original Easy button could be repurposed for this device but there are also a ton of options on Amazon that could work as well.

A bit harder would be the app software, as I am lead to believe getting notices in the background on mobile devices can be tricky and I don’t want to have to have the app running all the time. I have enough skills that I could make something that would send an e-mail (which would remove the need for a separate app) but I’m hoping for a solution with more reliability and less latency. It would be nice to have it send a notice no matter where I am but if it were easier to only work when my phone was on the same local network as the button that would be acceptable (I’m trying to figure out a solution that wouldn’t involve a server).

Anyway, just putting this down as a placeholder for when I have some free time to pursue it, but I also figure someone may have done this already and by posting this I’ll find out about it.

Network World Reviews OpenNMS

Posted on by Tarus

Today Network World published the results of a comparison among open source network monitoring applications. OpenNMS did not win but I was pretty happy with the article.

The main criticism I have is that the winner, Pandora FMS, seems to be the only one of the four reviewed that is more “open core” than “open source”. They have a large number of versions, each with different features, and you have to pay for those features based on the number of monitored devices. It seems to be difficult to have open source software that is limited in this fashion, as anyone should be able to easily remove that limit. Thus I have to assume that their revenue model is firmly based on selling software licenses, which is antithetical to open source. That said, it looks like the review was based on the “community” version of Pandora which does appear to be free software, just don’t expect any of the “enterprise” features to be available in that version any time soon.

I don’t know why I have such a visceral dislike of the “per managed node” pricing model, outside of having to deal with it back in the 1990s and 2000s. It seems like an unnecessary tax on your growth, “hey, customer, for every new device you add you have to pay for another monitoring license.” Plus, in these days of virtualization and microservices it seems silly. Our customers might spin up between 10 and 100 virtual servers as needed and tear them down just as quickly, and I can’t imagine the complexity that would get added to have to manage a license of each one of them.

Network World Comparison

Of the other applications reviewed, I’m not familiar with NetXMS but I do know Zabbix. They, like OpenNMS, are 100% open source and they are great people. It was awesome to finally meet Alexei Vladishev in person at this year’s All Things Open conference.

Alexei Vladishev and Tarus Balog

The only other thing that immediately pushed a button was the sentence “All four products were surprisingly good.” At first I took it to express surprise that free software could also be good, but then I calmed down a bit and figured they meant it was surprising that all four applications were strong.

For the article they installed OpenNMS on Windows. When I read that my heart just sank, because while it does run on Windows our support of that operating system grew out of a bet. We were talking many years ago about Java’s “write once, run anywhere” slogan and I mentioned that if that were true, why don’t we run on Windows? The team took up the challenge and it took two weeks to port. The first week was spent getting the few bits of code written in C to compile on Windows, and the second week on soft-coding the file separator character so that it would use a back-slash instead of a forward-slash. Even on Windows, the comments in the article were really positive, which make me think this whole Java thing isn’t such a bad idea after all (grin).

They used Windows because apparently was an issue with getting OpenNMS installed on CentOS 7, which was a surprise to me, but then Ronny pointed out that there can be some weird conflicts with Java and packages like LibreOffice that I don’t experience since I always do a minimal install. There is a cool installer for CentOS 7 which may help with that. We also maintain Docker images that make installation easy if you are used to that environment.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, not much has been done for OpenNMS on Windows since we got it working. It is fortunate because not much is required to keep OpenNMS running on Windows due to Java, but it is unfortunate because we really don’t have the Windows expertise that would be required to get it to run as a service, create an MSI installer, etc. Susan Perschke, the author of the article, seems to be a Windows-guru so I plan to reach out to her about improving the OpenNMS experience for Windows users.

One thing that is both common and valid is criticism of the web user interface. At the moment we spend most of our time focused on making OpenNMS even more scalable, and thus we don’t have the resources to make the user interface easier to use. That is changing, and most of the current effort goes into Compass™, the OpenNMS mobile app. The article didn’t mention it which means they probably didn’t try it out, which is more a failure on our part to market it versus an oversight on theirs.

They also didn’t talk directly about scalability, although it was listed in the comparison chart (see above). OpenNMS is designed to monitor tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of devices with our goal to be virtually unlimited in order to address scale on the order of the Internet of Things. That is why we wrote Newts for storing performance data and are working on both the Minion and Underling to easily distribute OpenNMS functionality.

Another reason we haven’t spent much time on the user interface is that our larger customers tend not to use it much. They rely on the ReST interface to integrate their own systems with OpenNMS and on things like the Business Service Monitoring.

But still, it was nice to be included. We don’t do much direct marketing and even though typing “open source network monitoring” into Google returns OpenNMS as the first hit we are often overlooked. Let’s hope they revisit this in a year and we can impress them even more.

Nextcloud, Never Stop Nexting!

Posted on by Tarus

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a long, navel-gazing rant about the business of open source software. I’ve been trying to focus more on our business than spending time talking about it, but yesterday an announcement was made that brought all of it back to the fore.

TL;DR; Yesterday the Nextcloud project was announced as a fork of the popular ownCloud project. It was founded by many of the core developers of ownCloud. On the same day, the US corporation behind ownCloud shut it doors, citing Nextcloud as the reason. Is this a good thing? Only time will tell, but it represents the (still) ongoing friction between open source software and traditional software business models.

I was looking over my Google+ stream yesterday when I saw a post by Bryan Lunduke announcing a special “secret” broadcast coming at 1pm (10am Pacific). As I am a Lundookie, I made a point to watch it. I missed the start of it but when I joined it turned out to be an interview with the technical team behind a new project called Nextcloud, which was for the most part the same team behind ownCloud.

Nextcloud is a fork, and in the open source world a “fork” is the nuclear option. When a project’s community becomes so divided that they can’t work things out, or they don’t want to work things out for whatever reasons, there is the option to take the code and start a new project. It always represents a failure but sometimes it can’t be helped. The two forks I can think of off hand, Joomla from Mambo and Icinga from Nagios, both resulted in stronger projects and better software, so maybe this will happen here.

In part I blame the VC model for financing software companies for the fork. In the traditional software model, a bunch of money is poured into a company to create software, but once that software is created the cost of reproducing it is near zero, so the business model is to sell licenses to the software to the end users in order to generate revenue in the future. This model breaks when it comes to free and open source software, since once the software is created there is no way to force the end users to pay for it.

That still doesn’t keep companies from trying. This resulted in a trend (which is dying out) called “open core” – the idea that some software is available under an open source license but certain features are kept proprietary. As Brian Prentice at Gartner pointed out, there is little difference between this and just plain old proprietary software. You end up with the same lack of freedom and same vendor lock in.

Those of us who support free software tend to be bothered by this. Few things get me angrier than to be at a conference and have someone go “Oh, this OpenNMS looks nice – how much is the enterprise version?”. We only have the enterprise version and every bit of code we produce is available under an open source license.

Perhaps this happened at ownCloud. When one of the founders was on Bad Voltage awhile back, I had this to say about the interview:

The only thing that wasn’t clear to me was the business model. The founder Frank Karlitschek states that ownCloud is not “open core” (or as we like to call it “fauxpensource“) but I’m not clear on their “enterprise” vs. “community” features. My gut tells me that they are on the side of good.

Frank seemed really to be on the side of freedom, and I could see this being a problem if the rest of the ownCloud team wasn’t so dedicated.

On the interview yesterday I asked if Nextcloud was going to have a proprietary (or “enterprise”) version. As you can imagine I am pretty strongly against that.

The reason I asked was from this article on the new company that stated:

There will be two editions of Nextcloud: the free of cost community edition and the paid enterprise edition. The enterprise edition will have some additional features suited for enterprise customers, but unlike ownCloud, the community and enterprise editions for Nextcloud will borrow features from each other more freely.

Frank wouldn’t commit to making all of Nextcloud open, but he does seem genuinely determined to make as much of it open as possible.

Which leads me to wonder, what’s stopping him?

It’s got to be the money guys, right? Look, nothing says that open source companies can’t make money, it’s just you have to do it differently than you would with proprietary software. I can’t stress this enough – if your “open source” business model involves selling proprietary software you are not an open source company.

This is one of the reasons my blood pressure goes up whenever I visit Silicon Valley. Seriously, when I watch the HBO show to me it isn’t a comedy, it’s a documentary (and the fact that I most closely identify with the character of Erlich doesn’t make me feel all that better about myself).

I want to make things. I want to make things that last. I can remember the first true vacation I took, several years after taking over the OpenNMS project when it had grown it to the point that it didn’t need me all the time. I was so happy that it had reached that point. I want OpenNMS to be around well after I’m gone.

It seems, however, that Silicon Valley is more interested in making money rather than making things. They hunt “unicorns” – startups with more than a $1 billion valuation – and frequently no one can really determine how they arrive at that valuation. They are so consumed with jargon that quite often you can’t even figure out what some of these companies do, and many of them fade in value after the IPO.

I can remember a keynote at OSCON by Martin Mickos about Eucalyptus, and how it was “open source” but of course would have proprietary code because “well, we need to make money”. He is one of those Silicon Valley darlings who just doesn’t get open source, and it’s why we now have OpenStack.

The biggest challenge to making money in open source is educating the consumer that free software doesn’t mean free solution. Free software can be very powerful but it comes with a certain level of complexity, and to get the most out of it you have to invest in it. The companies focused on free and open source software make money by providing products that address this complexity.

Traditionally, this has been service and support. I like to say at OpenNMS we don’t sell software, we sell time. Since we do little marketing, all of our users are self selecting (which makes them incredibly intelligent and usually quite physically beautiful) and most of them have the ability to figure out their own issues. But by working with us we can greatly shorten the time to deploy as well as make them aware of options they may not know exist.

In more recent times, there is also the option to offer open source software as a service. Take WordPress, one of my favorite examples. While I find it incredibly easy to install an instance of WordPress, if you don’t want to or if you find it difficult, you can always pay them to host it for you. Change your mind later? You can export it to an instance you control.

The market is always changing and with it there is opportunity. As OpenNMS is a network monitoring platform and the network keeps getting larger, we are focusing on moving it to OpenStack for ultimate scalability, and then coupled with our Minions we’ll have the ability to handle an “Internet of Things” amount of devices. At each point there are revenue opportunities as we can help our clients get it set up in their private cloud, or help them by letting them outsource some or all of it, such as Newts storage. The beauty is that the end user gets to own their solution and they always have the option of bringing it back in house.

None of these models involves requiring a license purchase as part of the business plan. In fact, I can foresee a time in the near future where purchasing a proprietary software product without fully exploring open source alternatives will be considered a breach of fiduciary responsibility.

And these consumers will be savvy enough to demand pure open source solutions. That is why I think Nextcloud, if they are able to focus their revenue efforts on things such as an appliance, has a better chance of success than a company like ownCloud that relies on revenue from software licensing sales. The fact that most of the creators have left doesn’t help them, either.

The lack of revenue from licenses sales makes most VCs panic, and it looks like that’s exactly what happened with the US division of ownCloud:

Unfortunately, the announcement has consequences for ownCloud, Inc. based in Lexington, MA. Our main lenders in the US have cancelled our credit. Following American law, we are forced to close the doors of ownCloud, Inc. with immediate effect and terminate the contracts of 8 employees. The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority.

I look forward to the time in the not too distant future when the open core model is seen as quaint as selling software on floppy disks at the local electronics store, and I eagerly await the first release of Nextcloud.

OpenNMS, Grafana and the Internet of Things

Posted on by Tarus

Things have been as busy and crazy as usual here in OpenNMS-land, so I often can’t find the time to talk about all the cool new shiny that is available. As my truck wouldn’t start this morning (it’s on the charger now) I thought I’d take some time to talk about a cool new plugin available since Horizon 16 was released.

One of the things I think will be needed in the next few years is a management platform that can scale to Internet of Things (IoT) levels. I also think that the only way to overcome the “Internet of Silos” effect will be to make that platform open source. I’d like OpenNMS to fill that role.

To that end we’re working on our “minion” project. These are lightweight remote processes that do data collection and monitoring and report up to a master OpenNMS instance, or even a cluster of OpenNMS management stations. In order to scale to the massive amounts of data generated by the IoT, we’ve created the Newts project to store time series data on top of Cassandra. Both of those projects are well under way and available for testing in various OpenNMS code branches.

Then we were faced with how to display all of this information. Jesse decided to do an integration with the Grafana project, and now this functionality is available as a plug-in (click to embiggen):


OpenNMS Graphs in Grafana

It’s pretty cool – Jesse translates the syntax used for RRDTool reports into a form that Grafana can use, and since this is hosted on the Grafana server you can integrate data points from multiple OpenNMS instances or pretty much data from any source that Grafana can access. Details available on the Wiki.

Hat’s off to the Grafana project for making such a cool application, and as usual we hope you find this new addition to OpenNMS useful.

Announcing OpenNMS 14 and Newts 1.0

Posted on by tarus

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the release of OpenNMS 14. Yup, you heard right, OpenNMS *fourteen*.

It’s been more than 12 years since OpenNMS 1.0 so we’ve decided to pull a Java and drop the “1.” from the version numbers. Also, we are doing away with stable and development branches. The Master branch has been replaced with the develop branch, which will be much more stable than development releases have been in the past, and we’ll name the next major stable release 15, followed by 16, etc. Do expect bug fix point releases as the in past, but the plan is to release more major releases per year than just one.

A good overview of all the new features in 14 can be found here:

https://github.com/OpenNMS/opennms/blob/release-14.0.0/WHATSNEW.md

The development team has been working almost non-stop over the last two months to make OpenNMS 14 the best and most tested version yet. A lot of things has been added, such as new topology and geographic maps, and some big things have been made better, such as linkd. Plus, oodles of little bugs have finally been closed making the whole release seem more polished and easier to use.

Today we also released Newts 1.0, the first release in a new time series data storage library. Published under the Apache License, this technology is built on Cassandra and is aimed at meeting Big Data and Internet of Things needs by providing fast, hugely scalable and redundant data storage. You can find out more about this technology here:

http://newts.io

While not yet integrated with OpenNMS, the 1.0 release is the first step in the process. Users will have the option to replace the JRobin/RRDtool storage strategies with Newts. Since Newts stores raw data, there will be a number of options for post-processing and graphing that data that I know a number of you will find useful. Whether your data needs are simple or complex, Newts represents a way to meet them.

Feel free to check out both projects. OpenNMS 14 should be in both the yum and apt repos, and as usual I welcome feedback as to what you think about it.

OpenNMS Newts at ApacheCon Europe

Posted on by tarus

Being Hungarian, I am very jealous and yet still proud that our very own Eric Evans will be presenting at ApacheCon Europe in Budapest, Hungary.

He will be talking about Newts which is a new time series data store built on top of Apache Cassandra. It will be a key part of positioning OpenNMS for the Internet of Things as well as being very useful on its own.

Eric is a dynamic and interesting speaker, so if you are attending the conference be sure to check out his talk.

And while you are there, eat a Túró Rudi or three for me.

Internet of Silos

Posted on by tarus

My friend Phil sent me a link to a Gartner article listing the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015” and I wasn’t surprised to see the “Internet of Things” at number two.

Now that mobile computing has become ubiquitous, there is a rush to network connect everything. Plus, there is a lot of money in it – take a look at the Nest acquisition. I’m not really certain this is a Good Thing™. My experience with low end network devices shows that corners that can be cut often are (i.e. crappy SNMP agents) and my guess is that in this rush to get things out the door we will end up with some serious issues.

One thing that can circumvent this is open source. By making the code transparent, especially for medical devices, there is a strong chance that major issues could be identified and corrected.

If, and that is a big “if”, we could get people to standardize around various open source software for the IoT there is a chance we can prevent the “Internet of Silos”. I first heard that term in a BBC article where it was announced that ARM (a British company) was creating an open source programming language for devices powered by its chips.

As you might expect, the article was short on specifics, but if the language is any good and the license is permissive, perhaps other chip manufacturers will port it. At a minimum it should encourage companies like Intel to also open source the technology used for their chips and the community might be able to build wrappers around both of them.

No matter what happens, we hope to support any management capabilities they introduce. We are actively working on making OpenNMS almost infinitely scalable to be able to handle the needs of the IoT, from insanely fast data storage (Newts) to highly distributed polling and data collection (Minion). We hope that the open nature of the platform will encourage more and more product vendors to use OpenNMS for their element management system, and then at least on the management front we can prevent the silos.

Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat

Posted on by tarus

My friend Nick sent me a link to a post called “Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics Of Open Source“. It immediately pushed a bunch of my buttons before I read the first word of the article.

First, it was from TechCrunch. I have nothing against TechCrunch and I respect a lot of their work, but they are Silicon Valley-centric, if not the main mouthpiece, and thus I have to take that bias into account when reading their articles. What works in the Valley doesn’t necessarily translate to the world as a whole, which is why a lot of Valley companies seem to quickly plateau after an initial success.

Second, continuing the theme of Valley biases, I strongly believe Red Hat doesn’t get the respect it deserves because it is headquartered down the road from us in North Carolina and not California. There is a strong sense of “you can’t make it if you aren’t here” in the Valley and that extends to a somewhat dismissive view of Red Hat. Plus, I have a big ol’ man-crush on Jim Whitehurst as he is the most successful tech CEO I know that really, really “gets” open source and thus anyone trying to tell me about the “economics of open source” without respecting Red Hat starts off on my bad side.

Finally, the author is currently at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or A16Z as those of us in the know refer to it. In last year’s investment tour I met with a large number of people in the Valley, and the guy I met from A16Z was easily the worst of the bunch. He made the caricatures of the Silicon Valley TV show look mild. He had no interest in us since we weren’t in California and he was more concerned with who we knew than what we did. I left that popularity crap behind in high school. Granted, we only rated an audience with the lower levels of the company, which overall does have a pretty solid reputation on Sand Hill Road, but still it was almost insulting.

Let’s just say my bullshit meter was halfway to pegged before I started the first sentence.

However, I found most of the article to be spot on. In my “Is Open Source Dead?” post I talked about how open source is both greatly increasing while the classic ideals of open source (i.e. free software for everyone) seem to be going away.

My own philosophy is that, at least for certain large and complex (i.e. expensive) software, the proprietary software model is doomed. Customer needs are changing so fast that no closed system can really keep up, and we’ve seen that in the biggest OpenNMS customers. I spent the last week in Ireland and the client was complaining that before they started using OpenNMS, whenever they needed some new functionality in their management solution the proprietary vendor took too long, cost too much and delivered too little to be worth it. Using a free platform like OpenNMS made it much easier to adapt the tool to their business workflow, instead of having to change it to meet the workflow of the management software. There is value in that – value that can be monetized.

Peter Levine started to win me over with “Red Hat is a fantastic company” (grin) and I as I read on I found my head nodding in agreement. He states

Unless a company employs a majority of the inventors of a particular open source project, there is a high likelihood that the project never gains traction or another company decides to create a fork of the technology.

While I estimate OpenNMS has around 40 to 50 active contributors, at least 15 of those are on my payroll, either directly or indirectly as contractors. While I definitely would like to increase the overall number, we are growing fast enough that we can usually hire someone who contributes a lot to the project, and then, since they can spend their full time on it, we as a group continue to contribute greater and greater amounts of the overall code. When I started out on my own back in 2002, I think at least half of the code came from outside of the .com side of things. Now it is probably closer to 5% or less. It has managed to let us focus on our direction for the application.

Then Levine continues:

To make matters worse, the more successful an open source project, the more large companies want to co-opt the code base. I experienced this first-hand as CEO at XenSource, where every major software and hardware company leveraged our code base with nearly zero revenue coming back to us. We had made the product so easy to use and so important, that we had out-engineered ourselves. Great for the open source community, not so great for us.

I’ve heard this tale from a number of people. Become successful and someone like IBM could dump 100 developers on your project and take it over. While we haven’t experienced it directly (rarely do people tell me OpenNMS is “easy to use”), we are constantly finding out about companies who have either based products on OpenNMS or used OpenNMS to provide services for profit. I think this is great, but it would be nice to capture some of that effort back into the project, either in the form of contributions or cash. It is one reason that the next major release of OpenNMS will be published under the Affero GPL.

So, with all this doom and gloom, what is the solution? Levine’s answer is “sell open source as a service”. I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly what we pitched to A16N. It’s something of a “win/win”.

This recipe – combining open source with a service or appliance model – is producing staggering results across the software landscape. Cloud and SaaS adoption is accelerating at an order of magnitude faster than on-premise deployments, and open source has been the enabler of this transformation.

If you have the in house development staff to leverage open source, it makes sense to become active in the community. David just finished a five stop roadshow in both the US and Europe describing the OpenNMS roadmap over the next year as we position the product for the Internet of Things. He met with our largest customers and all of them are eager to get involved, many pledging, OpenDaylight style, to provide the project with developers. They get input into the direction of the product and we get great open source code.

But what if you aren’t a large medical information company or a worldwide financial institution? You may need what OpenNMS can provide but don’t have the time to build in the workflow or customize it. We will have a solution for you.

The only issue I ended up having with the article was when he compared Red Hat to Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, etc. Sure there might not be another Red Hat, but I don’t expect to see another Microsoft (operating systems and office suites), Oracle (enterprise software), or Amazon (online product distribution) either. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be new mega-companies. In ten years I expect there will be some huge companies that no one today knows about, probably in the areas of 3D printing and biotech (specifically integrating tech into the human body). Enterprise software companies will be represented by a number of large-ish but nimble companies leveraging open source, and I wouldn’t count out Red Hat just yet as they too are pivoting to follow this new business model.

I want to close with one little story. I spent last week in Ireland where I just happened to be in Dublin where the band Wheatus was touring with my friend Damian (MC Frontalot) opening. They had a grueling schedule (shows almost every night) but I managed to see their concert and talk with them afterward.

Damian has just released a new album (it’s excellent, buy it) and he closed his set with “Charity Case” which includes the lyric:

It’s true:
Frontalot’s destitute.
I need you
to buy my CD so I can buy food.

He often pokes fun on the changing nature of the music business (his song “Captains of Industry” suggests that he is not a musician but instead is in the T-shirt business), and we talked about various business models. I pointed out that acts like Elton John are living the high life from work that basically peaked in the 1970s, and that sort of “royalties for life” model is gone. In its place are artists who sell directly to their fans, often including personalized premiums for a higher price, and touring. The band Phish tours extensively and they make millions, all the while encouraging their fans to bootleg their music, something old school musicians wouldn’t think to do.

At this point Brendan, the founder and front man of Wheatus, joined us and stated “there is nothing an old musician can teach a young one about the music business”. That quote really resonated with me.

In summary, I really enjoyed this article. It mirrored a lot of our thoughts over the last year as we seek to make OpenNMS successful. Remember, our plan is for OpenNMS to be *the* de facto management solution of choice and for that to happen will take a lot of work as well as money. But one thing that we will continue to do to emulate Red Hat is to keep publishing as much software as possible under an OSI-approved open source license.

That is still a key to our success: OpenNMS will always be free and OpenNMS will never suck.

Trust and the Internet of Things

Posted on by tarus

One of the main things we are focusing on at Dev Jam is scalability. The goal of OpenNMS has always been to become the de facto management platform of choice for everyone, and as more and more things become connected to the Internet, scalability will be a huge issue. It’s one thing to monitor a drink machine and quite a different thing to monitor millions of them.

The main performance bottleneck in OpenNMS has always been the storage of time series data. While much of it can be addressed via hardware, we realized we needed a write-optimized system that could perform at scale. The result of that work, lead by Eric Evans, is NewTS, the New Time Series database built on Cassandra.

As a left leaning libertarian, I’m really concerned about the privacy issues of the Internet of Things. One of the reasons I work on OpenNMS is to insure that the best platform for managing this data is also one that can be privately owned. It will be the end user’s choice one how that data is stored and shared.

Yesterday Apple announced a number of new initiatives at their WWDC keynote. These included iHome, a home automation platform, and iHealth, a platform for gathering personal biometric data. Among the new shiny was a total lack of concern about privacy. An example given was an integration between iHome and Siri, where you could tell Siri “I’m going to bed” and certain actions would happen. What people tend to forget is that almost all of Siri’s processing is done on Apple servers, and if you tell Siri you are going to bed, you are also telling Apple and who knows who else. The potential for 1984-like abuse is there, and it will be up to Apple users to either trust Apple or do without.

But does this have to be the case? Do users have to give up privacy or blindly trust in third parties in order to access useful technology?

I don’t think so.

The technology is there, and I believe eventually society will demand it.

One of the oldest examples of such technology is public key encryption. It’s a beautiful system, and while the encryption aspect is important, so is the ability to digitally “sign” things. What’s brilliant about it is that no personal information has to be given up – if one trusts the key then one can trust the signature even without knowing who signed it, and third parties can verify the signature as well.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Angel open source health sensor. I have a strong interest in tracking my personal health data, but I also don’t want to share it with a third party unless I choose to do so. None of the popular sensors, to my knowledge, have the option of keeping that data private if you want it to be useful.

So I’m constantly on the lookout for companies and products that “get it”, that understand my desire to only share the information I choose. I want to be marketed to, show me cool things I’m interested in, but on my terms.

One company I recently came across is called Personagraph. On the surface it appears to be another analytics company, but if you dig deeper you can find that they have a strong interest in personal privacy. I learned about them on one of my recent trips to Silicon Valley, but I had to dig to find references that reflect what I was told.

Of their three main products, I’m really drawn to PG Protect. The idea is as follows:

Let’s say that I have an application that collects several hundred metrics about me. For example, totally as a mind experiment, assume that I like to watch The Big Bang Theory in the nude while eating popsicles. I might not want to share the nudity aspect with anyone, but I am okay with letting people know I like the show and that I like popsicles. In a traditional marketing application, I would need to reveal these things to a third party, which would in turn sell them to interested companies.

But what if instead of individual metrics, some sort of aggregate score was created from my likes and interests, and that anonymous score was the only thing that was presented to the third party? They might be looking for people who score high on a number of metrics and yet they could be matched with me without knowing exactly which metrics I trigger. I could then be presented with offers and ads, and then the choice could be up to me if I want to engage. Speaking of “engage”, a product like Personagraph’s PG Engage could be used by the company doing the marketing to see how well their campaign was doing, without having to know any personal information about me.

Pretty cool, huh? What I like about their products is that they provide trust without having you to take it on faith.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get the privacy angle from their website. I did find a little YouTube ad that touches on it:

but the real meat can be found in this white paper. If you care about privacy, I encourage you to check it out as well as to make sure the companies providing the products and services you use are aware that privacy is important to you.