As I was going through the support queue today, I saw this response to Jeff from one of our clients concerning an especially tricky data collection issue he was having:
WOW, what a very detailed response.. Thanks! Changes made, working, and you can close this incident…
Thanks again for all you guys do!!
What a great way to start the day.
Last week I had lunch with Adam Schultz from Bold Interactive and he mentioned that the “social networking” version of Andy Warhol’s statement that everyone is famous for fifteen minutes is that “everyone is famous to fifteen people”.
Well, we just got the 15th member of the Order of the Blue Polo. Go OpenNMS! (grin)
I came across this link today about a talk esr gave to a users group in which he proposed that the open source community ditch licenses like the GPL.
While I understand his reasoning, there are a couple of flaws with it.
When I used to study economics, the models seemed pretty straightforward, but they were based on “perfect” market knowledge, easy entry and exit, and the idea that people act rationally. As I’ve talked about before, people quite often act irrationally. The software market does, in most cases, provide easy entry and exit (with some notable exceptions such as operating systems), but market knowledge is often hard to come by.
With a commodity like corn, it doesn’t really matter if the corn comes from Iowa or Nebraska – corn is corn. But what about cars? Is a Lexus the same as a Mercedes? How about a Hyundai?
The same issue exists in software. Is Tivoli better than OpenView? How can one objectively compare them? Often the comparison comes down to price – with the higher priced software considered “better”. One reason that Micromuse was so successful was that their software was priced higher than anything comparable on the market (at the time) and people just thought it must be better. It’s a problem we run into with OpenNMS – many people in decision making positions don’t think that “free” can be good.
Where I think esr misses the point is that the GPL guarantees a certain level of market knowledge. Without it, someone could take a project like OpenNMS, slap a prettier GUI on it and turn around and sell it as a commercial product. The potential buyer wouldn’t have to be told that there was an open source alternative, and thus the market wouldn’t “punish” the closed source version.
The GPL not only prevents that but provides for severe penalties if the license is violated. Any revenues from such commercial software sold in violation of the license could be forfeit.
To me the GPL is like locks on cars. They don’t keep a determined thief out, but they help keep honest people honest. It is a commitment to keeping the work of the community truly open. Until the software market can be better educated on the value of open source software, it can’t operate efficiently to punish the closed alternatives, so the GPL and similar licenses are the best things we have to insure that the value created by open source communities is protected.
Okay, I’m doing the Twitter thing again. They can’t seem to restore my old account so I’m using “mouthofopennms”.
I’m afraid I’m still pretty much in the same camp with John Cleese when it comes to my thoughts on Twitter, but I am nothing if not a slave to fashion.
I saw that salesforce.com surpassed US$1 billion in gross revenue last year. That’s pretty cool. But what floored me was the statement from Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, that the company was “the first billion dollar cloud computing company.”
Wha?
I didn’t even know that salesforce.com was a cloud computing company, and thus the statement pretty much pegged my BS meter.
But if you look down at the bottom of that press release you’ll see the statement “Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company.”
How can they make that claim? While I often use them as a great example of a Software as a Service (SaaS) company (which they call themselves as well) I’ve never thought of them as a cloud computing company. Are they referring to the force.com side of the business?
I asked John Willis, my resident cloud expert, about this and he wrote back:
Laugh clown laugh…. 🙂
Amazon just toppled 40 billion S3 objects and 490k developers. Amazon Web Services is single handily re-defining small business around the world. Rack Space’s cloud has reached 34k customer’s in around 1 year.
My guess is he wasn’t too taken by the claim as well.
Why do companies do this? Here is salesforce.com, hitting a sales milestone to be proud of, and they have to go and frack it up by posturing as some sort of cloud company just because it is trendy at the moment. And it’s not even like their stock is doing all that poorly – it’s up nearly 50% from the 52 week low of US$20.82 which isn’t bad in this climate.
Is it me? Am I the only one who feels the need to point stuff like this out? It strikes me like the commercial open core software business model trying to masquerade as open source.
It’s funny. I have a vested interest in educating the market on open core vs. open source, but I could care less about the cloud. But still I get all bent out of shape when I read stuff like this.
I need a hobby.
The US House of Representatives voted today not to delay the transition from analog to digital television since the Yeas did not achieve the 2/3rds majority needed.
As one of the few people I know who gets their television over the air, I can’t wait for the switch. Not only will it allow television stations to boost their digital signal, it will free up gobs of bandwidth for other uses.
It’s been over three years since the transition was put in motion, and if people aren’t ready now they won’t ever be ready. However, the Senate is trying to delay the switch by four months, and I can’t help but think this is motivated by more than just concern for the people. I am very happy the House saw fit to correct this and hope its action stands.
The last day of the show was a little busier than I thought it would be, but still pretty slow. I met a couple of interesting people, especially one little boy who fell in love with our dart men handouts. Since I didn’t want to have to haul them back on the plane I gave him half a bag. I let Jeff off at noon so he and Mandy could spend some time together in London, and I myself left around 4pm.
One of my favorite days of the year is when the clocks move back an hour for Daylight Saving Time. I am always wishing I had more time and the 25 hour day is pretty much a dream come true. It turns out that British Summer Time (the UK version) occurs this weekend but the one in the US is next weekend, so this year I get to do it twice.
Twofer!
The second day of the show was much slower than the first, but it picked up a little toward the end of the day. Alan Pope from the Ubuntu-UK Podcast came over and asked if I wanted to talk about OpenNMS.
Silly man, of course I want to talk about OpenNMS. (grin)
Then he told me I had about ten minutes, which caused the other guys in the booth to laugh, since most think I can’t finish telling people my name in ten minutes.
In any case it went pretty well (I thought). It hasn’t been posted yet but I’ll be sure to mention it when it does.
Nasty Cuisine
That evening Dr. Gallen took us out to the West End and Leicester Square where we had a nice meal at a Chinese place (not the one pictured above). It was much quieter than the last time we came down there.
After my insane schedule during my European tour last May I decided to plan for one pretty much “down” day this trip. I needed to catch up on mail and some other projects, and this was also the day that Jeff and his wife Mandy were showing up (Jeff has to work this week but Mandy gets to run around London).
They were pretty tired from the flight, but after lunch Jeff decided to stay up as long as he could to help adjust to the time change. That was cool with me since I needed to run some errands in town.
The first stop was the convention center in Olympia to check out our booth and hang the new banner. I based it on our large booth, and it turned out pretty well (the image is a rather high resolution since it is something like 300 dpi and ten feet long). The geek ghetto at this show was smaller than I was used to and once again we were off in a corner by the restrooms, but hey, that’s how we roll (grin).
On the way we passed the office for Bristol Cars. These are pretty exclusive, hand built English cars, and I got a picture of Jeff in front of the gullwing “Fighter” model.
After we got everything sorted at the convention center we had enough time to run down to Warrs Harley Davidson. I needed to add a London shirt to my collection.
Finally that evening we decided to have a small UK OpenNMS meet up. Alex Finger, who is based in Geneva, happened to be in SAP training near Heathrow this week, so he met up with me, Jonathan Sartin plus Jeff and Mandy. We wandered around Piccadilly Circus but most of the restaurants were very crowded so we ended up in this trendy bar called Revolution. The food and drinks were nice but man it was loud.
Once again Alex Hoogerhuis was supposed to meet up with us but he cancelled. Before I actually met him this happened about three or four times, so much so that we considered him to really be a bot, since we only ever saw him on the IRC channel as “_snd”. Once we got an actual bot in the channel, we christened it “_sndbot” in his honor. Since I am the only one to have met him Jeff still thinks he doesn’t exist.
Maybe next time.
