I really like reading Dana Blankenhorn‘s blog on ZDNet, and I felt a special resonance with his recent “The open source way to truth” post.

The mainstream industry press has a weird relationship to open source. At best it comes across as aloofness, almost like a parent admiring a small child who has learned how to tie his shoelaces – “Awwww, look what he did! Isn’t that cute?” At worst it is downright arrogant, as in the latest open source management tool “review” on Network World.

Of course, OpenNMS was left out of the comparison, as were a number of other open source projects. The only ones reviewed have received between $4 million and $24 million in venture funding, and thus obviously can afford decent marketing firms. This is important, as Dana writes “Tech journalists are uniquely susceptible to spin.” The author of the Network World review apparently did his research by leafing through his press inbox.

In today’s world any research probably starts with a Google search. Seriously, give a fifth grader the task of writing a paper on King Arthur, and his first action will be to go to Google and search on “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.” Go to Google and search on “open source network management” and OpenNMS is the number one hit (and has been for years). We don’t do anything special to get this ranking, it has just happened.

I’m actually glad that we were excluded from this review, because I am sure in the eyes of this author we would have been found lacking. OpenNMS is not designed to be a “pointy-clicky” out of the box application but a powerful tool, and like any tool it takes an investment in time to learn how to use properly. This bake-off appears to be extremely superficial. There is no mention of the actual requirements, or details of the scale of the network that is being monitored. There is a vague “It displays a map of the discovered nodes. It checks for connectivity problems and it notices performance problems. It alerts you via e-mail or pager” … it rubs the lotion on its skin, etc.

The arrogance part comes in the results, which Network World calls its “Clear Choice”. Clear choice? First, there was a 10% difference between the number one and number two products, hardly a clear choice. Second, as someone who has spent a lifetime managing networks, no application, including OpenNMS, is the clear choice for every situation. It would take me less than 30 seconds to come up with a situation where any of the three products reviewed would be the best choice, if that long. That’s why requirements are so important, and why OpenNMS choses flexibility over ease of use.

Dana writes “What that means for journalists is we should probably cover you more closely and vendors less so.” Perhaps when covering open source a little more research effort is required, since the vendor doesn’t always come to you. I look to Sourceforge as a great place to start when researching open source applications. Despite its faults, it is still the closest place to a comprehensive open source bazaar we have. That is why I am very excited to see OpenNMS nominated for “Best Project for the Enterprise” and “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins” in their Community Choice Awards (and remember to vote if you haven’t already). None of the three open source management tools reviewed, although they are active on Sourceforge, where nominated in these categories. These nominees were determined by the community, not by who had the most downloads, the most money, or the best press releases. Like our Gold Award from Tech Target where we beat out HP and IBM, this came from the people who actually use the application, and not some marketing firm.

I’ll take that over the “clear choice” any day.

Today has been an interesting day for me. For quite awhile now I’ve been crusading against using the term “open source” as a marketing strategy. The phrase has an exact meaning, and just making the source available does not make it open. Historically there have always been ways to get access to commercial source code with the right team of lawyers and the right contracts (i.e. money), but that is a far cry from being able to change it and distribute the derivative work – two pillars of the open source philosophy.

Well today a site called Datamation published “Ten Leading Open Source Innovators” which included a large number of companies that are neither open source nor innovators.

The one that caught my eye was Zenoss. As was reported at Infoworld Zenoss is based on Nagios. I have a hard time understanding how building a product on a five year old application achieves the definition of “innovative”. Nagios was innovative, we have yet to see if Zenoss can be.

But may day was made when I saw that this article made the usually peaceful Chris Dibona irate. Chris, as the open source guru at Google, has the second best job on the planet, and he has probably forgotten more about open source than I’ll ever know. “My outage is quite present” had me shouting alleluias in the hotel lobby.

“Damn kids. Get off my damn lawn.”

Heh. Priceless.

But then when Nat Torkington over at O’Reilly jumped into the fray, I started to get my hopes up that this might be the start of a trend of really questioning those companies who claim to be open source but aren’t.

Now listen – I don’t believe that software has to be open source to be good. I doubt that Blizzard would get any benefit from making World of Warcraft open source. I own several Macs, so I pay a premium price on hardware and often pay for both closed and open software. All I care about is using the best tool for the job. My goal with OpenNMS is to create the de facto platform for both open and closed management software, and the best way to do that is by nurturing the community that builds it.

So don’t think I’m trying to disrespect SugarCRM. We use the free version, and if it works for you, great. But let’s not call it open source.

Oh, I’m in California for the second week in a row, but will be heading home tomorrow. I promise to blog next week on more OpenNMS-centric things.

Today I read on Slashdot that the Expo was open at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco.

At last year’s show, OpenNMS won a Product Excellence Award for systems management, and it was pretty exciting. It was our second LWE (we were also at the one in Boston earlier in 2005) in the .org Pavilion, and we figured with our award win we’d be invited back.

We were wrong.

In 2005 the process for getting a space in the .org Pavilion was pretty straightforward. A guy named Duncan Newell managed it, and we were kept pretty up to date about our status. But Duncan has now left and there is a void where he used to be. I tried to figure out who to contact this year, but by the time I reached the “right person” all the spaces in Boston were gone. I asked to be kept in mind for San Francisco. A couple of months go by and I hear nothing, so I write back only to be told that you had to sign up in Boston for the SF show.

Sheesh.

Robin Miller came up to me last year and asked me if winning the award actually meant something. I said “yes” – while it’s just a piece of glass it stands as a monument to all of those sysadmins in the trenches who stood up to their PHB’s and proposed OpenNMS versus a commercial app. Here, at least, was some external validation that might make that process easier. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to mean much to the LinuxWorld folks.

It’s funny. We could probably afford to get a booth at the show, but it is important to me to be part of the .org “Geek Ghetto”. OpenNMS is at its heart a .org effort and I think that gets lost in the big money Linux arena these days (there was a mechanical bull downstairs at the last show, but I was more impressed by the BSD toaster).

One last footnote: After I missed Boston I received one of those little surveys via e-mail “Why Didn’t You Come to LinuxWorld Boston?” I filled it out, honestly, and happened to win one of the US$100 American Express gift certificates. Go figure.

At least we haven’t been overlooked by the rest of the world. We will be at the LinuxWorld Expo in London in October in the .org Village. That is managed by Brian Teeman of Joomla! fame and he does a great job with it. We were there last year as well as at the LinuxWorld Expo in the Netherlands. We had a chance to go to Korea in June but cancelled due to the lack of a Korean-speaking project member.

So, outside of LinuxWorld, where should a project like OpenNMS go? OSCON is a contender, but they keep turning down my paper suggestions. (grin)

While not open-source centric, we should be at LISA in DC in December. LISA is a serious geek conference, and I look forward to be asked questions like “How are you different from Nagios” over and over again this year. (grin)

It seems lately that at least once I week I hear about another company “adopting” the open-source model for their application. Usually this is a company that tried to create a traditional commercial application, failed at it, and they are hoping to ride the buzz surrounding “open source”.

But they just don’t get it.

Open source software development is not just about providing the source code for your application. It is much more about building a community around a shared project. That takes time. I think the biggest myth about open source software is that you say “hey, I’m open source now” and suddenly thousands of qualified people give up nights and weekends to work on your code. You can’t stick nine pregnant women in a room for a month and get a baby, it just doesn’t work that way.

But some people are trying.

Continue reading →

If you use Spamcop, you have probably been removed from any OpenNMS mailing lists, as they decided that Sourceforge was a spammer and bounced any e-mails that were sent.

(sigh)

You will not be able to receive Sourceforge mailing list mail for at least 21 hours (unless they get their act together and delist them sooner), but afterward please feel free to resubscribe. You should be able to check to see when Spamcrap has decided that Sourceforge is okay.

I know spam is bad. I hate spam. I get at least a hundred messages a day that make it past my filter, but acting like torch wielding villagers and automatically shutting down all traffic from a particular IP address is not the way to solve the problem.

We were in Texas this week for a meeting, and I thought it’d be fun to wear suits. Little did I realize it was going to be 110 Fahrenheit, but we wore them anyway and the client got a big kick out of it. Phrases like “get a camera” and “I didn’t know HP was here to pitch OpenView” were spoken.

And when we got back to the hotel, someone asked us “Are you with FEMA?”

The point is that we are a small company, made up of techies, and we aren’t able to fly around promoting OpenNMS, giving out lots of cool gifts, etc. We rarely, rarely wear ties, much less suits.

But when folks do sign up for support, they get some nice shirts with the OpenNMS logo. It’s just our way of saying “Thanks for supporting us, and welcome to the family.” So it was great when a client in Switzerland posted this picture of their “welcome” care package: How Customer Service Should Work.

Okay, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to be a little more active on this blog. Heck, I can’t be much more inactive, can I? (grin)

I moved it to the new server and with Eric Evans’ help got it running, and what do I find? 2400+ blog spam comments.

So, off I go to clean it up, and install MT-Blacklist, and guess what? I still get spam.

Thus there is a new policy. For the three people who read this thing, I’ll leave comments open for one week. That way it will just be easier to edit out the spam comments that make it passed the filter. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I was thinking of posting this under “Commentary”, but it goes a bit beyond that and into the realm of “Rant”.

I have spent several hours today trying to get the virus protection on my Windows server to work. Now, I don’t do silly things like download software from unknown people, run “.exe” attachments that I receive in the mail, or use Outlook, so I am not to worried about a virus trashing the data on my system.

I am worried about a virus getting on my system and then propagating via my address book, etc., and pestering other people. I think if you use the Internet, then you should at least take the basic precautions to insure that you don’t contribute to the spread of viruses, etc.

The easiest way to do that is to run a fairly secure operating system, but since I use DirecPC to access the Internet, I am required to have at least one Windows box around.

This system is simply a DirecPC router. It contains the DirecPC software, Deerfield’s WinGate proxy server (so that my Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux systems can actually use the network connection) and not much else.

I did (until this afternoon) have a copy of Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus on the system. It seemed to be working, but when it tried to scan the server once a week, the program would die with a vague error message. I spent most of this afternoon trying to fix the problem. No luck.

So I went looking for alternatives. My experiences with McAfee’s solution were worse than that with Symantec, so I decided to trial Trend Micro’s PC-cillin. So far so good.

But what the rant is about is how trapped I felt using the Symantec product. It is a pig of a program, and when it failed – nothing. My guess is that Microsoft may have changed a DLL or something in one of the various Windows Updates, or Symantec blew it with a poor registry entry, but there were no logs or anything to even begin to track down the problem. It seemed to fail on a particular sub-directory, so I spent hours scanning and re-scanning to try at see exactly where it would fail (The logs said: Beginning scan … scan failed. How useful).

Sure, I run into issues with open source software all the time. But I never seem to have to “hunt and pray” nearly as much to find the issues. Maybe it’s because the software is simply better, or maybe it’s due to the fact that open-source code is built to be debugged.

By being easier to debug, it would follow that open source software would have less bugs than a closed program of equal complexity. And since the debugging process is open to any and all, you get the bugs squashed more quickly as well.

But with commercial software, you just chuck it, and Symantec has lost me as a customer. Ah, I long for the day when I can do most everything that is important using open-source software.