It was brought to my attention today that Nick Yeates, the new Community Manager at Zenoss, posted a “Lets [sic] Beat the OpenNMS Community” note to the Zenoss forums.

If you’ll remember, a few days ago I posted a notice about the annual LinuxQuestions poll, which included:

If you’re feelin’ the OpenNMS love, please vote. Since OpenNMS appeals to a much smaller, power user class of people than many system and network admins, we rarely win these things, but it is nice to be included in the poll.

Nothing too fancy. Nagios always wins these type of polls anyway (followed closely by MRTG and Cacti) and I wasn’t expecting much, and I even said so in announcing it.

So I found it amusing that a company with US$25 million in venture capital decided to call us out on this particular poll. I mean, if they are feeling threatened by a bunch of guys with no marketing budget, no VC and the backing of a small (yet profitable) company, there is no way they could stand up to an HP or IBM. Ethan Galstad must have them quaking in their shoes, not to mention my buddies over at Zabbix.

It wasn’t the BOSSIE. It wasn’t TechTarget. It was LinuxQuestions.

I wasn’t going to say anything at all, but then the phrase “OpenNMS Community” started to bother me. You are trying to beat my community? Not me personally, or the OGP or the OpenNMS Group, but the OpenNMS community as a whole?

First off, you can’t beat our community. I have never had the privilege of working with a better group of people. These are busy professionals, usually at the top of their field, who care enough to take the time to further our project.

Second, they tend to be too busy to register for polls like this, or care about the results.

Third, while I have serious differences with Zenoss, Inc. calling themselves an open source company, I would never attack the Zenoss community. Time after time I’ve stated that the best software is software that works for you, be it Zenoss, or Nagios, or Solarwinds or Tivoli or, yes, OpenNMS. If using Zenoss gets more people involved in the “open way” then this is a “Good Thing” and I’ll be damned if I’m going to discourage it.

I don’t know what’s happening over in Zenoss-land, but the departures of Mark Hinkle and Matt Ray have obviously left a void.

This morning, as I was browsing through my RSS feeds, I saw an article on Cult of Mac about the VLC media player being removed from Apple’s App Store.

The VLC project is one of those amazing examples where open source is demonstrably better than commercial software. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better media player. Quicktime? Not even close. You have to add Perian just to be able to come near supporting the number of formats VLC can. It seems it would only be a matter of time before someone wanted the power of VLC on iOS, and a company in Paris did just that.

The problem is that VLC is published under the GPL, and Apple’s policies, such as limiting a particular download to just five devices, go against that license. One of the contributors to VLC, Rémi Denis-Courmont, took issue and his complaints caused the app to be pulled.

Now, for iOS lovers this is a bit of a blow, since VLC is such a great piece of software. John Brownlee at Cult of Mac was upset about it, and he posted a pretty vitriolic attack on Denis-Courmont. He also pointed out that Denis-Courmont works for Nokia, an Apple competitor, and thus implied this action might have been driven both by business interests as well as a hatred of Apple.

Most of the true free software people I’ve met encourage the adoption of free software everywhere. Apple wasn’t directly benefiting financially from the inclusion of the software (it was free). Other aspects of the license were maintained, as the developer of the port, Applidium, made all of the sources available. So it is a real grey area as far as the intent of the license goes, but since the GPL expressly forbids adding additional conditions to the license, Apple is indeed in violation, and Denis-Courmont has every right to complain.

I am a fan of Cult of Mac (they featured my original Mac in their 25th anniversary coverage) but I thought Brownlee had expressed his frustration poorly in the ad hominem attack on Denis-Courmont. So I posted a comment pointing it out.

Here’s the funny part, instead of getting slammed by the fanboys, the next three posts agreed with me, and, having had time to chill a bit, Brownlee toned his post way down.

Wow. Calm discourse on the Internet that resulted in a positive change.

How often do you see that happen?

It used to be that Microsoft was considered the antithesis of open source, but now I would claim that Apple represents the opposite of “open” (which is a little ironic considering that the Darwin operating system that forms the basis for Mac OS X is based on BSD). From difficulties in getting software on such devices as the iPhone, to the addition of custom “security” screws on its hardware, Apple is the new icon for monolithic “cathedral-like” development.

Steve Jobs is a master of controlling the conversation, and he has attempted to reframe the “open vs. closed” debate into “integrated vs. fragmented“. There can be no doubt that his “integrated” approach has proven very profitable for Apple (poised to become the most valuable company on the planet this year, passing Exxon) but I don’t believe that his methods are ultimately sustainable. Truly open environments (as exemplified by Andy Rubin’s wonderful tweet in response to Jobs’ comments) can grow and adapt much more quickly than closed systems, and as more people are drawn to them this innovation accelerates.

Part of this may arise from frustration. When the iPad was announced, a friend of mine who uses a Kindle stated that he liked the fact that the Kindle didn’t rotate orientation, so he could read a book in bed on his side without it going into landscape mode. When the iPad came out there was a switch on the side that served as an orientation lock, given the iPad the same functionality.

However, in iOS 4.2, that switch became a mute button, and there is no way to change it. This is extremely annoying to people who use that feature and they have no recourse short of jailbreaking their device.

But the question remains: is it possible to create polished and “integrated” apps using open source? Many people opt for Apple’s products (myself included) because they “just work”. They trade freedom for ease of use, in much the same way that old quote mentions that in a fascist state the trains run on time.

I believe that from the fragmented chaos that is open source, order can arise, but in doing so it needs to adopt some of the methods of people like Steve Jobs. Many open source projects are run by committee. One of my favorite quotes about committees comes from Ferdinand Porsche:

“Committees are, by nature, timid. They are based on the premise of safety in numbers; content to survive inconspicuously, rather than take risks and move independently ahead. Without independence, without the freedom for new ideas to be tried, to fail, and to ultimately succeed, the world will not move ahead, but live in fear of its own potential.”

Now this may fly in the face of what most people think about open source communities, and I’m not saying that every project needs a benevolent dictator, but in any kind of chaotic system order can arise around certain people and ideas.

Take the web, for example. If I am traveling and I want to investigate a particular hotel, there are any number of web sites offering reviews and advice. But I tend to head straight for TripAdvisor. Over the years, that site has built a reputation with me as a great place for information. Even though there is no pay-wall, even though I access it the same way I can access all of those other sites, I go to TripAdvisor.

In much the same way, I expect Apple to start seeing serious competition from solutions based on open source.

To make this happen, the open source community is going to have to come to grips with the idea that certain leaders are going to arise and start making decisions that aren’t popular in order to achieve a high level of integration, where all the apps seamlessly interact and have a similar look and feel. One such person is Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical.

I doubt anyone reading this is unaware of Mark Shuttleworth. I first became aware of him when these “Ubuntu” CDs started appearing like mushrooms after a summer rain a few years back. At a time when the Linux desktop was considered to be all but dead, he put his energy and considerable resources into a new distribution based on Debian with a focus on the desktop experience.

While I rarely see a Linux laptop that isn’t running Ubuntu, Shuttleworth’s efforts have not been without criticism. He decided to include non-free, proprietary drivers in Ubuntu in order to make the user experience easier. There have been some claims that Canonical doesn’t contribute back to the communities of the software they use.

The most recent controversy arose when it was announced that future releases of Ubuntu would use the Unity desktop instead of being based on GNOME.

I got the idea for this, now increasingly, long winded post when I read a note on Jono Bacon’s blog about the need for respect in open source communities. Jono is the community manager for Ubuntu and a Canonical employee, and I can’t help but think that his post arose from the Unity decision.

I think it is quite natural for people in the open source community to be a bit wary of Canonical. There are a lot of people out there who want to exploit open source and even I have wondered about Shuttleworth’s motives. I’m always suspicious of altruism (at least the in the business world) and considering the millions of dollars that Canonical has put into Ubuntu I think we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But, you know, it really doesn’t matter. It’s open source. This is the main reason, while Shuttleworth may create things as good a Jobs, that he will not become the next Jobs. He could decide to change the orientation lock button to a mute button, but it would then be a simple matter to change it back, or at least make it a configurable option.

Awhile back Shuttleworth made a hiring decision that seemed rather strange to me, as this person was kind of the poster child for everything wrong with open source business. At conferences in LA, Oregon and Ohio I asked members of the local Ubuntu communities what they thought about it.

The answer? They didn’t. One guy in LA said quite bluntly that they didn’t care much about what Canonical did. This, more than anything, is why open solutions are more powerful in the long run.

Sure, it takes someone with vision like Shuttleworth to make an Ubuntu, but he doesn’t control it. That is why it has such a rabid following. Prefer KDE? Switch to Kubuntu. Don’t like some aspect of it? Fork it.

Ease of use often means the removal of options. It is one of the reasons I describe OpenNMS as a network management application platform instead of an application. It has so many options that it can be hard for a newcomer to understand how to use it, but once that learning curve is climbed it is truly powerful and empowering. Fewer options would make it easier to use initially, but then you are stuck when, inevitably, a unique problem arises that needs to be addressed. That’s why we see such a migration from other “easier” tools to our project.

Critics of open source may look at our factions and our bickering as reasons why open source will fail. I look at the fact that we can’t all get along as a strength. It allows “ideas to be tried, to fail, and to ultimately succeed” in a way that closed culture simply can not match.

Yes, I use a Mac. Yes, I hate freedom. Yes, I use Mail.app.

And I am a bit of a security nut.

One of the most useful pieces of software I’ve used over the years is a plug-in for Mail.app called GPGMail. It was originally written by Stéphane Corthésy and released under an open source license, and it allows one to easily decrypt, encrypt and sign GPG messages right from Mail.app.

The problem is that Apple doesn’t really have an API to make such an integration easy, so with every new release of Mail.app it would usually break the plug-in, and Stéphane was responsible to fix it.

Well, after awhile Stéphane wanted to move on to other things, and with the advent of Snow Leopard GPGMail was broken – seemingly for good.

Stéphane writes:

I’ve just read the latest emails on the list, without participating. Actually I haven’t participated to the project since a very long time, for personal reasons. Situation will not change in the future, I guess.

It’s been now 10 years since I started GPGMail. At that time we were working on Rhapsody, the ancestor of Mac OS X, the link between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. gpg had just gone 1.0. I started the project because it might have been a critical piece of code for us at Sen:te in the near future, and it was really fun to develop 🙂

Plugin was then made public, and received some interest in the Mac community, though it was still for geeks. Interest in PGP became bigger, the MacGPG project was born a year later, thanks to Gordon Worley. This encouraged me to go on with GPGMail development, and also MacGPG sub-projects. I spent many week-ends and nights coding for those, and have been very happy to see interest growing more and more.

Then time passed, it became hard to find people able to help on MacGPG development, and very few people were able to spend time to understand the underpinnings of (GPG)Mail, except me, unfortunately. By making the project open-source I had expected that people would come in and make the project go further. I was rather deceived by this, I must admit. There was no real momentum.

On my side, I wanted to explore also other projects, and became tired of working on GPGMail. I wanted something new. It was getting boring, I had less time to reply to user requests, and code had got very messy. GPGMail development quite stalled from that time, I spent time on it only after major system updates. I was still hoping some people would enter and help on the project in the long-term, not only for a single patch. Thus I opened up the project by putting it on SF, with a real OpenSource license that would’t prevent people from working on GPGMail.

To be honest, I waited a rather long time to upgrade to Snow Leopard specifically because GPGMail support was important to me. When Stéphane backed out of the project, the list was abuzz with people wondering about its future. Luckily, a number of people stepped up to take it over. The project launched a new website, the code and bug tracker was moved to github, and various patched versions started to come out.

Stéphane continues:

When Snow Leopard arrived, I was already spending no time on coding during spare time, and was not really willing to. Finally people entered into the dance and started coding, not only whining. And I must admit I’ve been really surprised by the results they obtained (congrats Lukas and others!). I kept telling myself I would update the project, and make a public release, when I’ll find time to, but the fact is that I cannot, for several reasons.

For so many years I’ve been hoping to find people helping me on the project in the long-term, without finding any, but now that time has come, project can fly without me. I hope there will always be enough people to take care of it. Till now, project was organized by only one person, and depended only on me. I took care of every details. It’s time to change that model and let the project be managed more flexibly. The bazaar model, as I would say.

So please, move the project out of SF, leave it opened to developers, designers, writers, aficionados of all kind. It’s no longer dependent on me, it will depend on all of you. I will close the SF project (and mailing list), and redirect the Sen:te web pages to the new site, once you completed the migration, then I’ll have a glance at the project, from time to time, probably to complain 😉 . My baby’s no longer a baby; it no longer needs me.

Thanks all for your support, and now take great care of GPGMail.

Today the team released version 1.3.0 of GPGMail, the first real release under the new model. It installed for me without incident, and I am happy that this project will live on. Thank you Stéphane and thanks to the whole GPGMail team for making this happen. Plus, none of this would have been possible if GPG itself wasn’t open source and packaged by a number of groups. Score one for the open source ecosystem.

Had GPGMail been commercial software, I would have been out of luck, but because it was open source, and that there were many who found it valuable, it lives on and propers.

Awesome.