Adventures in Open Source

I just finished a week in Montreal. This was my first time in Québec, and while the weather could have been better, I really enjoyed the trip.

Québec is like France but with subtitles.

The primary language is French, but many signs are also in English. The rule seems to be that the English translation has to be below, and in a point size no larger than 50%, of the original French. Hence, subtitles.

I stayed downtown and took the Metro out to the customer site. They are a managed service provider with a goal to manage more than 50,000 access points across the country. They had been using OpenNMS for awhile, so it was a lot of fun for me since I got to help solve interesting problems, but it was also a lot of work because I got to help solve interesting problems. They worked my brain pretty hard to come up with a way for OpenNMS to address their needs, not just from a functionality standpoint but to come up with solutions that could also be automated and scaled. It was amazing how flexible OpenNMS can be, and with one exception we were able to address everything without changing the code.

I can honestly say that they would not have been able to do this with any other product out there. Not only are other solutions too rigid, their cost struction (i.e. per node pricing) would make them prohibitive on cost alone. Score one for open source.

It wasn’t all work. I did get to sample some fine cuisine (Montréal has a large number of nice restaurants) as well as local favorites such as “steamies” (hot dogs) and poutin (fried, fresh cut potatoes covered in a gravy sauce and cheese curds).

We also went out to see a midnight showing of “The Avengers” (review: very good, but unless you are a huge comic fan, maybe not as great as some of the reviews suggest – and stay until the very end of the credits) so I”m beat.

Plus I only had 30 hours at home before heading to Germany for the OpenNMS Users Conference Europe.

(sigh)

I’m sitting at DFW as I write this, on my way to FRA. The trip started out poorly since I forgot both my jacket and my headphones (which usually live in my case but were in my jacket since I’d only been home for a short while and, hey, I’d obviously remember to get it on the way out) but I did manage to find an inexpensive jacket at the airport (thank goodness for the changing seasons).

But things started to get better as I managed an upgrade on the first flight, and as I walked into the Admiral’s Club I almost bumped into Snoop Dogg, who was heading out. I’m glad I didn’t as the enormous bodyguard with him would have crushed me like a piece of paper.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Fulda, and I’ll try to keep the blog updated throughout the week. Remember that we are bringing the goodness that is the OpenNMS Users Conference to the US this year. Hope to see you there.

The most exciting part of the year, at least from the perspective of OpenNMS, is now upon us. In the next two months we have a number of awesome events happening.

Next week is our fourth annual OpenNMS Users Conference Europe. There is
still time to register (until Friday) if you want to join us in Germany for four days of classes and presentations:

We have also announced our next week-long training class to be held at company headquarters in Pittsboro, NC, USA the week of 4-8 June.

Next, our seventh (wow) annual developers conference, Dev-Jam 2012, will be held in Minneapolis, MN, USA the last week in June.

If you develop on OpenNMS, this is a great way to spend a week with most of the major contributors and to sharply hone your skills with respect to the OpenNMS code.

And now for the big news, we are also announcing the first ever OpenNMS Users Conference Americas to be held for three days starting 26 June.

Modeled on the European conference, the first day will consist of a seminar (taught by yours truly) covering the basics of OpenNMS. The last day will consist of a barcamp. This is an “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda. We’ll entertain suggestions for talks, vote on them, and then present the most popular ones. With most of the development team in attendance, pretty much any topic is up for grabs and expect it to be addressed by experts.

The middle day is very special. It is a standard conference day that we would like to use to focus on our community. That means you. We’ll be giving a roadmap presentation first thing, but then we’d love to fill the day with presentations by you on how you use OpenNMS.

If you are interested, send an e-mail to the call for papers: cfp@opennms.org telling us what you’d like to talk about. If it gets accepted, you’ll receive a complementary conference pass. I wish I could cover the air travel as well, but we will cover the conference, room and board for our speakers.

Hope to see you in person soon.

I went to my first Open Source Think Tank conference in Napa, California last week, and since I’ve come back I’ve been trying to think of the best way to write about it without seeming like an ass (well, more of an ass than usual).

I didn’t like it, and found it slightly unpleasant. In defense of the conference, I am certain I was in the minority, and I did really enjoy the networking opportunities, but the conference as a whole was not for me.

I first heard about the Olliance Group’s Think Tanks back in 2007, and I commented about the first one in Europe back in 2008. The event is invitation only, and I complained, tongue in cheek, that I was never invited to such things. I was surprised that Larry Augustin took the time to comment on that entry that no one knew I was interested, and since then I’ve been invited to them all.

Considering our business model of “spend less than you earn” keeps me busy, I have never been able to justify spending several days at a resort in wine country, but it turns out that this year was I going to be in San Francisco that weekend anyway, so I decided to attend to see what the whole thing was about.

In the Thursday opening remarks we were told that we could talk about the conference, but it was courtesy not to quote anyone by name. This was to make sure the conversations could be as open as possible without the attendees having to couch their thoughts within a political agenda. I’m cool with that, so please forgive me if I’m a little short on details in this post. What happens at Think Tank stays at Think Tank.

The conference consists of a couple of days of panel discussions, presentations and in this instance, two case studies. Once a company presents an issue involving open source that they would like to resolve, the attendees break out into teams to discuss a number of questions and possible solutions. On Saturday morning, teams were to present their findings, and the best teams win a Motorola tablet.

One of the case studies consisted of a trade organization that was trying to establish some open standards, but as with most such groups they receive funding by basically hoarding information. We struggle with this all of the time with our involvement in the TeleManagement Forum. We are trying to develop open source reference implementations for a variety of TMF interfaces, but we get resistance at sharing them, since those interfaces are considered TMF intellectual property. I won’t say that the process is hopeless, not at all, but it is a struggle.

The second one involved a large application currently managed by a branch of the US Government that they are in the process of making open source, and they wanted input on how to get more community involvement.

Interesting questions, but nothing I really wanted to spend time talking about. I was there to get ideas on how to stay true to our open source ideals and yet make lots of money. I believe the answer lies in the fact that many open source projects are large, powerful and complex, and you can monetize making it simpler for people (i.e. SaaS, etc.).

So you can imagine my surprise that two of the people I met at this “open source” conference, and had a lot of fun with, were from Cisco and Adobe. I also met the legal counsel for one of our largest customers, a guy from Amazon that used to work down the road at Red Hat, and the woman who was ultimately responsible for nuking my paper submission to OSCON.

In addition I got to see some familiar faces, including Jono Bacon, Erica Brescia, Mark Hinkle and Ross Turk.

But cool people cannot compensate for the universal truth that panel discussions stink. There were a lot of them. And the whole tone of the conference was aimed at the “Go Big or Go Home” crowd, of which I’m not a part. This doesn’t mean I have in any way limited my vision for OpenNMS, but getting bigger for just the sake of size is just not me. I want to build a company that lasts, and through keeping a large and growing customer base happy, make a lot of money. The “Go Big or Go Home” folks seem attracted to models in which rapid growth is the only goal, and if the initial investment doesn’t fund it, future growth is taken out on the backs of customers (<cough>Groupon<cough>). I just found little I could use at the conference.

For example, at Friday’s breakfast I ended up at the same table with Martin Mikos. He has made a personal fortune under the banner of open source, but he keeps confusing proprietary software (with an open source component) with open source software. Through his leadership, MySQL ultimately ended up being owned by Oracle, and the inability of Eucalyptus to understand the difference led to the OpenStack fork. But what am I going to do, ambush him at breakfast? Not only would that not be cool, he would not care, and I seriously believe he is unaware of the difference. I think that was true of a lot of the attendees. To many, making money is more important than building something to last, although making something that lasts does not preclude making money.

I did try to introduce myself to Rod Johnson, but never got the chance. I was hoping he’d get a laugh out of this old picture I have of Ben Hale taken during one of our early Dev-Jam conferences, back when SpringSource was called Interface21.

I did have to leave in the middle of the conference to head into the city (the main reason I was out there), so it is possible that had I stayed for the whole event I might have gotten some answers to my questions and had a better overall experience. But I think overall the divide was too great between my experience with open source and most of the people there.

With all of the recent press about Red Hat becoming a billion dollar company, I can’t help but imagine how different that company would have been had it been headquartered in Silicon Valley. The Think Tank conference seems to primarily represent Valley thinking, and while that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, it’s not for me.

I think there are better ways.

Just a quick post to point out two things.

The first was that I found myself seeing a lot of press about the OS X FlashBack Trojan, and I immediately tried to test my iMac … before I remembered I was on Ubuntu.

I thought that was interesting, not only because Linux tends to be safer from such things but mainly due to the fact that I totally forgot I wasn’t on OS X.

I should also note that most sites are suggesting that the easiest way for people to detect the trojan is to download and execute some code off the Internet. (sigh)

The second thing is that David Bryne has started blogging again, and he has a cautionary tale about Amazon removing Kindle content without asking permission:

It seems that, once again, Amazon has removed purchased material from our devices. I suspect Apple had a hand in this as well. Apple has consistently sabotaged their competitors’ apps and software that allow you to sync other devices with their own. Then, all of the sudden, apps that once did X and Y suddenly don’t perform those functions anymore. In most cases those apps were free—so it is hard to complain too much. Although, some of the free apps contained magazines, books and other content, like Decoded, that I purchased and though they may not have been very good, I paid for them and they were mine to keep! They came to my house and ripped pages out of my book!

As much as I’d love to have some sort of e-reader, until they stop doing stuff like this I’ll vote with my wallet.

OpenNMS has many uses, from insuring that customers of a billion dollar pizza business get their food on time to maintaining the machines that guard nuclear fuel, but we all know what we really need.

A way to manage our soda machines.

Nothing says “ugly” like a bunch of geeks, and nothing is uglier than when those same geeks are deprived of caffeine.

Thus today, the OpenNMS Project is happy to announce the Open VeNDing Project (OpenVND), leveraging the power of OpenNMS to address this need for the greater good.

Visit www.openvnd.org today for the full details.