open source

Predictably Irrational

Posted on by tarus

I’ve been working on OpenNMS for over seven years now. Before that I spent over ten years with proprietary tools, including software from most of the big players like IBM’s Tivoli and HP’s OpenView.

When I first got involved with open source management software, I thought pretty much what everyone thinks: cheap OpenView. What I’ve learned in all those years is that free and open software is so much more than just “cheaper”. In fact, trying to sell open source software as a cheaper version of a proprietary product is the wrong way to go. It puts the buyer into the position of comparing the two products as if they were the same, and thus they only focus on what they are familiar with, the features of the proprietary product, and not the real benefits of the differences.

Free and open software does not mean cheaper licensing fees. It means freedom from licensing fees altogether. It moves the power to direct how the product is used and developed from the vendor to the consumer. This results in both the removal of vendor lock-in as well as the ability for the solution to grow with the business with out any “management tax” that per-node pricing models impose.

Unfortunately, the open core crowd, by using the term “open source” to describe their proprietary software, muddies the waters quite a bit. By positioning themselves as the “cheap OpenView” they end up competing in terms of the proprietary software, as in “do you have this feature” and not with “here’s how to manage your network better”.

I’m often surprised by the success of open core software, especially in the US. To me it is a bit irrational. Why give up per-node priced proprietary software with the attendant vendor lock-in for cheaper per-node priced proprietary software with vendor lock-in, even if there is an open component?

I’ve attempted to understand this with my Free Food analogy. Suggesting an open source software solution is like offering someone free food. If someone offers you free food out of context, you immediately think “is it safe to eat?” This is followed quickly by “what’s the catch?” In the case of open core, the decision makers, once they find out that, yes, there are software licensing fees involved, relax. They understand licensing fees and they are comfortable making a decision within the framework of “cheap OpenView”.

I was talking about this with Alex Hudson in London, and he turned me on to a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. It’s a great read, and it demonstrates, complete with experiments, how we moist robots often act irrationally when making choices, but in a predictable fashion. Given a particular situation, one can reliably predict which irrational decision will be chosen.

As a businessman I need to be able to position the strengths of OpenNMS against proprietary products on a basis other than “cheap OpenView”. I need to be able to describe the power of the community, the flexibility in getting exactly the features you need in weeks instead of years, and the wonderful things that can happen when you put a tool like OpenNMS in the hands of a capable administrator. I need to make sure that, when presenting OpenNMS as a solution, that the decision to choose it is rational.

The first example in the book involves a magazine subscription. The buyer is presented with three options:

  • On-line content only: $59
  • Print content only: $125
  • Print and On-line content: $125

Notice that the Print and Print+On-line options are priced the same, so a rational person would never choose Print only (although I am certain a few Luddites would do it if the sample was large enough). However, Ariely found out through experiment that many more people would choose the $125 option over the $59 option when all three options were presented than if it was removed. The addition of this “decoy” option caused people to value the $125 option more, even though there was no rational difference between the two offers.

I can see how this would work. By seeing the three options my thinking might run something like this:

The Print option is $125 and the On-line option is $59. The Combined option is $125, which represents a savings of $59 since On-line is included free. If I subtract the $59 from $125 I come up with $66, so I’m actually getting the Print version for nearly half price!

Of course, this is complete bollocks. If my main source of accessing this information is on-line, then the Combined option actually costs me more than twice as much, but Ariely’s experiments showed that this is how many people make decisions.

So, what does this have to do with open source software?

In other sections of the book, Ariely explores predictable irrationality in a number of different contexts. While all of them have some bearing on selling in general, several really struck me as relevant to open source: “The Cost of Zero Cost”, “The Cost of Social Norms” and to a lesser extent “The Effect of Expectations” and “The Power of Price”.

What Ariely found out in his research was that the term FREE! has a profound affect on behavior. In one experiment they offered a Hershey’s kiss chocolate for 1 cent and a Lindt chocolate truffle for 15 cents. Since the truffle costs about 30 cents, it was the better deal, and people realized it.

However, when he lowered the price of each by one cent, making the kiss free, the situation was reversed. Many more people chose the kiss, even though the economic value was the same in both situations.

Being a geek, I immediately thought that part of the problem could have been the purchase process itself. I may not want to stop and purchase a candy but I might pick one up for free in passing. I could rationalize that my time has a certain value. One thing I love about this book is that Ariely takes this into account (he’s either just a good experimental behaviorist or a geek – maybe both). When the experiment was repeated as part of a cafeteria check out line (where the consumer was already in the process of purchasing so the choice of whether or not to buy candy added almost zero time to the transaction) the results were the same.

This would seem to be a good thing for open source, and in many cases it is. A harried sysadmin with little time or patience for the purchase process might grab MySQL or Apache, even on Windows, just because it is free.

The problems arise when you bring the idea of commercial open source into the mix. By commercial open source I don’t mean open core but commercializing an open source project in a manner that doesn’t involve proprietary software licenses, such as services and support. When you add in a cost, any cost, it seems to bring the discussion back into comparing software products and not solutions. Thus a product like OpenNMS now gets put into the same feature for feature comparison of a commercial software product like OpenView, even though the value offered is totally different.

When this happens a number of things take place. In one sense brand awareness and expectations come in to play. In the Expectations section of the book a particular food dish is described as a “mélange of the freshest roma cherry tomatoes and crisp field greens, paired with a warm circle of chèvre in a fruity raspberry vinaigrette”.

Sounds a lot better than “goat cheese salad”, doesn’t it? One would expect it to taste better than a plain ol’ goat cheese salad, too.

In the “Power of Price” chapter Ariely shows studies where patients experienced a more rapid and complete loss of symptoms when they believed they were taking a more expensive medication, even if the two choices offered were the same drug, or even when the more expensive medication was a placebo. Expectations and price play a big role in the buying decisions we make.

This affects OpenNMS, especially in the high end markets such as carriers. When a company is used to spending tens of millions of dollars per year on management software, it is inconceivable to them that they could get the same thing for free. Again the problem comes from comparing the price of OpenNMS software against, say, IBM software and not the solutions themselves, which are a combination of software and services. No one at the carrier level buys software without a huge services component, but in trying to position the services that The OpenNMS Group supplies against those from, say, IBM Global Services, it seems that it it often shifts back to the software.

I had to laugh at the recent row between Groundwork and HP over the practice of Groundwork comparing the price of its solution against OpenView. Groundwork is an open core software company that cobbles together a number of rather good open source tools. Unfortunately, in the accounts where we have replaced Groundwork with OpenNMS our experience with that product shows that it is nowhere near as well integrated as OpenView’s various parts (and that’s saying something) and it is definitely not worth the rather large price they place on it – OpenView or no OpenView.

Seeing Groundwork trying to compare itself to HP reminds me a lot of Hyundai’s latest campaign to compare its Genesis car against brands like BMW and Lexus. Due to a bad car accident I was in many years ago that was caused by a Hyundai driver, I’ve never liked the brand. Recently I rented a car and was given a Sonata, and I had to admit it wasn’t a bad car. It wasn’t a car I would buy, but for an economy sedan it had a lot of high end features.

The problem is that you can’t take a car that was originally designed to compete on price and suddenly move it into the luxury market. In people’s minds the expectation has been set that Hyundai is a cheap car. Not necessarily a bad car, but definitely not a luxury vehicle. The price and value of a Hyundai have been anchored in peoples minds (see the chapter “The Fallacy of Supply and Demand” in the book to learn about anchors) and once anchored it is hard to change. That’s why there is a Lexus for Toyota and Acura for Honda – it was necessary for those companies to break the existing preconceptions.

Open source software has almost always been marketed on price, and when that happens it will always be hard to break into the markets controlled by expensive commercial software. It is very important for the industry to focus on the non-software benefits – freedom, adaptability, ease of ownership and the benefits of the community – instead of trying to just be a less expensive version of an established product. Part of that is to be honest about the differences between open source and open core. Bringing closed software licenses into the model will just cause confusion.

I’ve often said that the main strength of The OpenNMS Project is its community. By being totally free software, and sharply separating the commercial services business from the project, we have managed to gather a small but dedicated core of individuals who are emotionally invested in it.

Ariely addresses this community in the chapter on social norms. He divides social interaction into two types: those governed by social norms and those government by the market. Severe problems can arise if one tries to mix the two.

His first example describes a Thanksgiving dinner. In the US the Thanksgiving holiday falls on the fourth Thursday of November, and it is usually celebrated by family gatherings and a large meal, quite often a feast. This feast is often prepared by a matriarch in the family (in my case it is my mother) He imagines what would happen at the end of the meal someone got up and offered to pay this person. I know in the case of my family my mother would be mortified. She cooks (for days) as a labor of love, and to try to turn that effort from a gift into work (which is what happens when you place a monetary value on it) is highly offensive.

Quite often businesses try to form a more social relationship with their clients due to the vast benefits it brings (I probably could not afford my mother’s Thanksgiving meal if I had to pay for it) but this can backfire. In the book there is an example of a day care center that had a problem with parents picking up their children late. It was a small business and the owners and the clients had a social relationship, so when the parents were late they felt bad about it and tried to be better in the future.

However, the owners decided to impose a fine if the parents were late in an effort to reduce the tardiness even more. The moment the fine was brought in to play, the dynamic changed from social norms to market norms. Now that parents were paying for being late, they decided to judge being tardy not in terms of inconveniencing the owners but in terms of the cost versus whatever was causing them to be late. In other words, they had a market way of determining how being late affected them without regard to how it affected the owners of the day care center.

There’s more. Since the fine actually increased the number of late pickups, it was removed. But the parents’ behavior didn’t change. Once the relationship moved from the social to one based on the market, it was very difficult to move it back.

This, more than anything, is why I am happy that we have been so vigilant about separating the community side of OpenNMS from the commercial one. The OpenNMS Project is a community owned and community run endeavor that is governed by social norms, and The OpenNMS Group is a business, run by market norms. We still strive for a social relationship with our paying clients, but the commercial side is a real, profitable business and not a charity. If we started to offer proprietary extensions to OpenNMS, I bet that part of our community would then start to view the project in terms of market norms and we would lose a good part of the benefit the community provides.

While I still have yet to digest everything I read, I did take away some key points:

  • Remember that they power of open source comes from the community, so make sure not to destroy it by introducing market norms into the relationship.
  • Competing on price turns a discussion of solutions based on open source into a discussion of software versus software. In many cases open source will lose.
  • The value of FREE! is strong, but the commercial open core companies use of the term “open source” dilutes that. We in the free and open software business need to be vigilant about educating the market on the difference.

I don’t recommend “business” books very often. In fact, I can’t remember recommending anything other than Crossing the Chasm, so take that into account when I say to run out and get Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Open Core Software

Posted on by tarus

I got to chat with Jay Lyman of the 451 Group today. Most analysts (with the exception of Coté) tend to ignore our little ol’ project but the 451 Group likes to get in touch every several months or so.

It was fun to think and talk about the market for open source management tools for awhile, and I also wanted to find out who came up with the term “open core” (apparently it was Andrew Lampitt). I first saw it used in a 451 CAOS Theory blog post by Matthew Aslett.

As my three readers know, I have a bug up my skirt about the “hybrid” open source companies, where part of the code is closed off but part is open. I call it the “shareware” model where some of the functionality it open but you have to buy a commercial closed license to get all of the features.

I won’t rehash all of the reasons why I hate this model being referred to as “open source software” but I would like to focus on the term “open core software”. In my mind it is more descriptive of what the hybrid companies are doing than “open source” and it doesn’t have the negative connotation that “shareware” brings to mind.

So I plan to steal it.

I don’t think that you’ll see “open core network management” any time soon in the marketing literature of these companies. “Open source” is a much more valuable term, but “open core” is at least a more honest approach, meant to represent a company that releases the core of their product under an open source license but generates revenue as a vendor of proprietary additions to that core.

Jay asked me how our business was doing in the wake of the worldwide recession, and I said that on the whole things were okay. Fourth quarter is usually strong for us, and this year is no exception, but currently we have a lot of projects sitting in limbo. Everything has been approved but most of the large companies we are dealing with are holding their breath on spending in any form. We’re still seeing 40% to 45% year over year growth, which is a lot less than some of the open core companies are reporting, but then again we’ve been seeing that for four years now and they just haven’t been around that long.

He also asked what I thought about the business prospects for the open core guys and I had to admit that they don’t look that great from where I sit. Since they tend to compete on cost, there are at least three main pressures that are going to be bearing down on them in the next few months.

First, pressure from the established commercial players. Sure, the open source part of their product is free, and it is hard to beat free, but what about their commercial part – the part that they sell to keep the doors open? A small OpenNMS customer has a network of 1000 devices. Some of the open core vendors charge per device, on the order of US$250 to US$500. So this translates to US$250K to US$500K per year. One can usually get a Tivoli or OpenView solution for 1000 nodes at much less than that. Will someone go with the newcomer or the established player when the established player costs less?

Now, everyone realizes that there is no one out there paying those prices for the new guys. If you have a 1000 node network you can easily negotiate them down to a fraction of the list price as they are desperate to get new clients. And for some people getting 90% off of a price that was made up in the first place is a deal. But if what they are buying are “ease of use” features the second source of pressure will be from the smaller commercial players like Solarwinds. Why pay US$25K a year when you can get a complete out of the box solution for slightly less than that and only pay for it once? Orion runs on Windows, it is very pretty and it is reasonably priced. And you don’t have to deal with that pesky open source stuff.

The third source of pressure comes from the pure-play open source guys. A couple of years ago I had dinner with Peter Fenton, a smart VC with Benchmark. He told me that a product really needs to “own the bottom”. I didn’t agree with him and pointed out things like Mercedes Benz that sell to the top. I was told by others that I wasn’t supposed to argue with the VC, but I did anyway and in the end he convinced me he was right. After all, Mercedes had to seriously reinvent itself when Lexus came to market with a similar product at a lower price.

By having a totally free alternative, users of other products will constantly question their need to pay for commercial software. In many cases, like the small and medium businesses that use Orion, something like OpenNMS isn’t quite for them. But for others, products like OpenNMS provide a real alternative to their current solutions.

Most of the open core players are VC funded, and eventually those VCs will want to cash out. To do that they need to increase revenue. Thus you can expect those low, low, introductory prices to go away, and when companies find out the real cost for the open core software they will be looking for alternatives. They will be looking toward the bottom.

In the meantime we plan to keep running OpenNMS profitably. This means that year after year it will keep getting better, and slowly but surely the pressure on those other solutions will just keep building.

For those companies it is a race; a race to build themselves up and get acquired before they lose their customer base. It is hard to compete against the bottom, which was the point Peter was trying to make. I think Sun’s current lack of success with MySQL has made everyone a bit cautious about open source acquisitions, and with the current economic climate I don’t expect that to change any time soon. In that context the prospects for open core companies don’t look so rosy to me.

Back in the Magic Tube

Posted on by tarus

In just a few short hours I will be an ocean away in London.

Sometimes the chore that air travel can become prevents me from seeing exactly how magical it really is. It is amazingly safe and fast compared to how my grandparents came to this country, and that was less than 100 years ago.

I like international travel. OpenNMS brings people from a large number of countries together through the magic that is the Internet. One forgets just how big this planet can be, and how wonderful its diversity.

See you in the tubes.

Update on Nethinks MONET and OpenNMS

Posted on by tarus

As I wrote a couple of days ago, we were told about a product in Germany that looked heavily based on OpenNMS, although no acknowledgement was given in the article. Since a number of people involved with OpenNMS are German, we set about investigating, and I’m happy to report that it doesn’t appear that there is any license violation going on here.

Alex Finger, one of the OGP, contacted the company and talked with Ronny Trommer of Nethinks. I received this note from Herr Trommer today:

We sell no licenses. We have created a distribution of Open-Source Tools. One part of them is the MONET-SNM-module which uses OpenNMS. The MONET-Ticket module uses OTRS and the MONET-Reporting module uses JasperServer from JasperForge.

All our changes are completely GPL. We have build a NagVis-adaption to OpenNMS cause some customers want it. Additionaly i have created a JasperServer-Interface to get a better Report-Management with JasperServer. This is fully documented incl. source on http://www.opennms.org/index.php/JasperServer_Integration. The source is complete GPL and everybody can use it. If someone interested on the NagVis-Adapter we will give full source. We have posted it on the mailinglist.

I have instructed our webmaster to clearify the situation with a new product-description like here:

http://www.nethinks.com/sub/produkte/

Our job is to do projects in network management, service desks and reporting for our customers.

All our installations on customers contains the following copyright

Distributed by NETHINKS GmbH – OpenNMS Copyright © 2002-2008 The OpenNMS Group, Inc. OpenNMS® is a registered trademark of The OpenNMS Group, Inc.

The about-page is not changed.

All our customers know, they use OpenNMS in MONET-SNM. They had never paid a buck for a license.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the definition of “open source”, and especially its use and commercialization. It is exactly companies like Nethinks that we want using OpenNMS, and they have done an excellent job of contributing back to the community. While we have completed an OTRS integration directly in to OpenNMS, I plan to work to see that this JasperServer work gets integrated as well (giving Nethinks full credit, of course).

When I wrote the original article I tried to err on the side that Nethinks was indeed abiding by the license, and it is great to not only find out that they are but they have gone a bit beyond the required with their website changes and contributions.

Thanks to Alex and Ronny for getting this straightened out.

Fedora on XO: Step 2

Posted on by tarus

My XO showed up yesterday. I spent most of the night downloading the latest firmware image which took about 4 hours over the hotel’s crappy Internet (it was only 250MB).

OLPC Unboxing

Following the instructions I based the box, installed the new firmware and then got it connected to the Internet for a “Software Update”. That took another couple of hours, but I didn’t want to go to bed until I had managed to get the developer key that would let me boot into Fedora. Then I went to bed.

This morning I got up and worked on getting the LiveCD of Fedora 10 working on the USB stick. This was a little tricky on my Mac so I ended up booting into a Fedora 9 VM I had with me, and once I figured out how to set the disk label to something other than “loop” I got the image loaded.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t gone very smoothly since then. When I boot into Fedora I get a kernel failure message on the desktop:

but can’t find anything useful in the logs. Then the load average starts hanging out above 10 and the machine is not responsive at all. But, hey, this is what testing is for.

Yes, Virginia, There is Commercial Open Source

Posted on by tarus

After yesterday’s post some people might think I’m a long-haired, all software must be free and open, hippie, and that anyone who is trying to make a buck on open source is evil.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I buy a lot of software, it is just that I pay small amounts for it. My belief is that software will take one of two paths. Stuff that is designed to just work out of the box with little user training will become a commodity, and the expensive, high-end stuff that requires a ton of consulting will become open. Plus, I have short hair (the better to fit under a motorcycle helmet) and I pay my mortgage on open source.

The problem is that neither of these paths make it easy to make the serious amounts of money in a short amount of time that one could in the past. People aren’t willing to pay 6 to 7 figures for commodity software, and it is hard to sell free and open software licenses since, well, they’re free.

Now what happens is that the people who long for the good old days and want to sell millions in software licenses stick the term “open source” on it and hope no one will notice. This is my take, in a nutshell, on the current state of “commercial open source” software.

But there are a couple of examples of companies that truly are “commercial open source” and are doing well. Plus, they are in the US of all places. However, the two companies that first come to mind are not in Silicon Valley. I know some amazing people in Silicon Valley, but sometimes when I’m there I get this vibe that it’s a bunch of smart people who are still a bit insecure, and thus they have to spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back for how clever they are. The clever/smart density outside of the Valley is much lower, so we actually have to get some work done [I kid, I kid].

The first company is Digium in Huntsville, Alabama. Our own Jeff Gehlbach is currently is Arizona at AstriDevCon and has let me know of some great things coming in the near future. I come from a telephony background, and what Digium has done with Asterisk is quite amazing. We use it, and I was humbled that OpenNMS was only one of two open source projects that made TechTarget’s Product Excellence Awards last year, and the other was Asterisk.

Even though a number of companies have tried to commercialize the Asterisk code, Digium remains solidly behind the free and open source model, as Mark Spencer recently said:

I believe it would be foolish to attempt to make Asterisk’s innovation only available as a proprietary product when clearly it is its Open Source foundation that made it so successful and continues to do so, in spite of emotional and to a lesser degree business challenges imposed by people who leverage my work without contributing — and in some cases directly attacking the very company that makes it possible for them to succeed.

The second one is my old favorite, Red Hat. Located about 30 miles away from our offices in Raleigh, NC, they are quietly moving forward, recently posting a 29% year over year revenue increase. Unlike the Valley open source firms, the goal is not to rapidly get acquired and cash out, but to build something lasting. In fact, it is Red Hat that is doing the acquiring.

What I love about Red Hat is that they enable us to exist. Even though we run on Windows and Solaris, if there wasn’t a stable, supported Linux distro out there my job would be a lot harder. I would estimate that about one third of our clients are also Red Hat clients, with another third using CentOS. The last third is spread around Solaris, SuSE and Debian/Ubuntu.

Neither of these companies have a business model based mainly on proprietary software licenses, yet they are doing well. As it was demonstrated, at least in Europe, there are different expectations overseas for software that calls itself open. As more and more business is being done overseas, it will be companies like these (and I hope, OpenNMS) that see the lions share of growth in market share and revenue.

That sounds pretty “commercial” to me.

Radio Free Europe

Posted on by tarus

Some of my friends have a habit of trying to push my buttons. Many times they succeed (grin), and thus today I was asked to comment on a blog post by Larry Augustin about the difference in viewpoints on open source between Europe and the United States.

This post was based on his take on the first Europe Open Source Think Tank. I know they hold one of these in California every year, but I don’t get invited to that one either so this was the first I’d heard of it.

I had the pleasure of having dinner with a group that included Larry about 18 months ago. He intimidates me a little. He is a very nice guy in person, and he is probably one of the most financially successful people involved with open source. But then I read about things like the MedSphere debacle and I don’t know what to think except to be a little scared. In all fairness I never heard the Medsphere story from Larry in person, so there might be a nicer take on the whole thing.

Anyway, Larry put up a detailed chart comparing the views of open source between companies in Europe and in the United States. The OpenNMS Group has customers in over 18 countries outside of the US and from my experience the analysis is dead on.

When you say “open source” outside of the US, it means 100% free software. If you look at the column labeled “European View” it pretty much echos what I’ve been saying for years. The “commercial” open source business model as seen in the United States View is not open source.

Free and open source software represents a shift in the ownership of software from a small, tightly controlled group to a large, disperse community. It is 100% transparent and 100% free. Thus the value moves away from the code itself and onto those who can best use it. The Europeans seem to understand this.

In the US a lot of new software companies are driven by venture capitalists. Contrary to popular belief, VCs are actually very conservative and sometimes quite timid. They only want to try things that have been done successfully before. They know how to sell software, and now that open source is a popular buzzword, they want to sell open source software. So what happens is that either a mature commercial product that isn’t selling is labeled “open source” in order to garner interest, or a new product is created with an “open source” part in order to garner interest.

I think the tolerance of this model is driven by my free food analogy. Corporate decision makers are wary of “free” software and wonder what the catch is. When they find out that they actually have to pay for it in order to realize true benefit they return to their comfort zone. The fact of the matter is that in the US these people could care less about open source. They want the cheapest solution, and if it has to come with an open source label so be it.

For some reason the Europeans (and Asians and the Pac Rim in my experience) expect open source to mean free and open software, and they grouse at any attempt to pervert the term. Perhaps it is because Europe consists of so many different languages that it is harder to dilute meaning.

I could go on forever about “enterprise” editions v. “open source” editions, etc., but even now I begin to repeat myself. So let me end this with three points.

First, while the European understanding of open source is solid, the rate of adoption is lower than you might imagine, especially in the UK. While we have a number of clients in England in some cases it was a hard sell.

Second, during my dinner with Larry the talk was all about how to deal with Nagios. I think the bigger concern is how to deal with Solarwinds. Orion is mature, pretty to look at, affordable and in many cases a useful tool. How do you get someone to pay US$100/node for “free software” when they can get unlimited management for US$20,000? If cost is the basis of your business model, prepare to get undercut.

Second, not all companies in the US misunderstand the usefulness and power of open source. I’m at a client right now who really gets it. They’re excited, I’m excited, and we are doing great things.

We are pretty sure we know how to become very successful without having to resort to selling software (I won’t blog about the details on that though – a boy’s got to have a few secrets). In the meantime I also have no doubt that one or more of Larry’s companies will make lots of money. He’s smart that way.

It really depends on the ultimate goals of the software creators and the people who back them. Do you want to make a lot of money fast, or do you want to build something that lasts? I know a number of wealthy people whose life’s work is a footnote in some other company’s portfolio.

I want OpenNMS to be around for decades. Okay, so I won’t be able to buy a Ferrari in the next year, but then again my hope is the project will be around long after the car is a pile of metal.

And I’d much rather have a V-Rod.

Here, Eat This

Posted on by tarus

It’s past 1am here so forgive me if this post rambles more than usual, but I wanted to get this thought down while it was still fresh.

I am always on the lookout for new analogies for explaining open source. Some don’t quite hit the mark, such as selling open source software is like selling bottled water, but I think I came up with one today that rings pretty true.

I am often amazed at how little mainstream business understands or knows about open source. To me for many applications it is a no-brainer to use open software.

But today I was thinking. What if I was walking down the street and a person, out of nowhere, offered me food? Nothing really strange or compelling about the person making the offer, just “hey, free food”.

I think my reaction would be very similar to the way most businesses approach open source. First I’d be thinking – is it safe? My second reaction would be – what’s the catch? I mean, I’m pretty much used to paying for food, so free food is kind of suspicious.

I think the analogy works. Of course, it all comes down to trust. If you trust in the person giving you the food, no matter what the context, you are more likely to eat it.

I’ll flesh this out more later, but I need sleep now. Talk amongst yourselves.

Measuring Open Source Success: Become Superfluous

Posted on by tarus

This has probably been the most successful developer’s conference we’ve ever had. The main reason is that the core community is becoming mature with respect to the code.

Think about it. Most of the highly successful open source projects you have heard of are code-centric, i.e. they tend to be used by programmers or people with a strong programming background.

OpenNMS is different. The main users of the product are network and systems administrators. Sure, they’re used to writing “glue” code and scripts, but they usually don’t have any formal training in programming.

For the last several years we’ve been holding these conferences to help convert those decades of management knowledge into high quality code. Matt (who does have a tremendous amount of programming knowledge) has been a a great mentor and as this conference shows we’ve come along way.

When I took over maintaining OpenNMS in 2002, it was just me. I was pretty much responsible for everything, and so I pretty much knew all there was to know about OpenNMS. If a bug got fixed, I fixed it. If a question got answered, I answered it. I did as much as I could, and at times it was scary and it was always overwhelming.



Back Row: Alex, me, Alan, Craig G., Craig M., Jeff, Matt, Mike, Alejandro
Front Row: Johan, DJ, Walt, Jonathan, Rob, Dave, Bill, Ben
(photo by Alex)

Not anymore. The project is growing so fast it is amazing. Today Mike Huot pointed out that even with the majority of the people involved with the project here in Atlanta, the mailing list is pretty much maintaining itself. People are coming up with features, writing code, and fixing things without any interaction with me.

I have become superfluous.

So many open source projects revolve around a single person or a very small group. For whatever reason they never seem to let go. Others only exist because some corporation controls them and the majority of the work is done by the employees of that company. I’ve always found that such organizations quickly become isolated from the needs of the end users and their efforts start to focus more on what generates press or short term revenue than on solving real-world problems. OpenNMS is special in that, for some strange reason, we’ve created something with a life of its own; a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

This frees me up to tell stories and write silly blog posts and to play with an OpenNMS that gets better every day. I get to go out and solve management problems using a powerful tool purpose-built for the job. We must be doing something right, because when a long time customer called me today to schedule our annual week of training, I looked at my calendar and replied “December”.

So let me say “thanks” to everyone involved with OpenNMS. Let’s go do great things.