Adventures in Open Source

When I became a maintainer of the OpenNMS project over ten years ago, for several months OpenNMS consisted only of me working on a laptop in my attic. One of the things that kept me going were my connections to, at the time, a group of strangers on the OpenNMS IRC channel and on the mailing lists. They kept me going at times when I wondered if anyone really cared about this project. With their help I was able to keep the project going until it could grow, and now I am very happy that OpenNMS is so much more than just one guy.

Moving forward to 2005, the business side of OpenNMS consisted of me, David Hustace and Matt Brozowski. We thought it might be fun to get together with other members of the community in person, and thus Dev-Jam was born. I invited anyone interested to fly out to Pittsboro, NC, to spend the week hacking on OpenNMS, and five people took me up on it: Bill Ayres, Craig Gallen, DJ Gregor, Johan Edstrom and Mike Huot.

It was a great week, and we learned a lot about the best way to get a group of disparate guys together. Everyone has different sleeping schedules, so it would be nice if people could set their own hours. Also, easy access to food would be cool. Finally, lots of bandwidth doesn’t hurt.

For the next Dev-Jam, Mike suggested we hold it at the University of Minnesota. And thus we decended on Yudof Hall.

It worked out so well that we have returned there for five of the seven Dev-Jams. Outside of the first one, we did Georgia Tech one year, and while it was okay it seems that Yudof is our home.

Things have changed a lot since that first Dev-Jam (although four of the original five people came this year as well). We have more money than we had back then, so this year I rented a bus and we all went to see the Twins play baseball. We had great seats in far right field, and while I’ve always pictured us as being in far left field, they worked out well and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect.

We even got our name up on the Jumbotron.

I had a couple of spare tickets left over, so we invited along some students. Ulf made some new friends.

And that’s pretty much what it’s all about: friendship. We got a lot of code written that week, but my main goal was to increase community involvement in the project. We’ve been lucky as a business that I’ve had such a great talent pool to pull from when hiring, but I worry when I hire a lot of community members that those I’m not paying will feel left out or less inclined to contribute. I really, really want a strong independent OpenNMS Users Group, and to that end I handed out copies of Jono Bacon’s “Art of Community” in hopes it would inspire people to stay involved.

OpenNMS is a great mixing bowl for bringing people together. We had people from seven countries (Canada, France, Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Venezuela). The seven Germans sat next to the one Italian as Italy once again knocked Germany out of a major soccer tournament.

One of our oldest fans, Ronnie Counts, who has been using OpenNMS longer than I have, got to meet one of our youngest developers, Ronny Trommer, or as we call him in this context, Mini-Me.

Another German, Markus Neumann, was awarded the Order of the Green Polo for his work on the code and in building the community, especially in Germany (he’s mentoring two Google Summer of Code students).

Everyone seemed to have a great time, and I am already looking forward to next year.

I am in Minnesota this week attending the seventh annual OpenNMS Developers Conference. With the exception of one year, we’ve been having them annually since 2005 when five people (outside of opennms.com) flew to Pittsboro crash at my house and to spend the week hacking on OpenNMS. This year we have 26 people from seven countries descending once again on Yudof Hall at the University of Minnesota for a week of community, coding and just having a good time. What’s even cooler is that four of those original five guys are still here.

This is one of my favorite times of the year. While I work almost every day with someone who is not local to me, this event brings us all together so we can work face to face. It’s an amazingly fun week.

I was trying to label what the Dev-Jam experience is like and I came up with things like “enjoying being a geek” or “engaging in free culture” but the best phrase I could come up with was “celebrating abundance” (especially when it comes to food at Dev-Jam).

I was once taught that the definition of “economics” what the study of how limited resources are applied toward unlimited desires. This makes sense in terms of food, water, cars, gold, etc., but it seems to break down when it comes to digital products, such as music, video and software. While good software is definitely scarce, once it is created the cost to produce more of it is close to zero.

Since creating software is both a iterative and evolutionary process, it seems to follow that the more software that is available to developers, the faster it can be produced. Think of it like bittorrent – the more people share the faster it happens.

And since I brought up bittorrent, I have been following with great interest the recent debate concerning digital music, sparked by a post by a 21 year-old woman on NPR’s “All Things Considered” blog. In much the same way that fauxpen source companies try to redefine “open source” to mean anything from the “freemium” to the “open core” model, media producers (music, video, books) are struggling to figure out how to deal with the fact that their traditional way of generating revenue is being threatened. It seems similar to what the horse carriage industry felt with the arrival of the automobile, or the telegraph industry when the telephone came along. You can fight it for awhile, but eventually you’ll lose.

(Note: I want to point out that I am extremely happy to see Simon Phipps appointed as the president of the OSI as I believe he will do a lot to fix this misappropriation of the term “open source”).

I love it when content creators, instead of trying to preserve the status quo through legal threats or legislation, actually embrace change for their benefit. This digital revolution creates an environment where the people who create the content can be the ones who directly profit from it. People like Louis C.K. and Jonathan Coulton seem to “get it” and their lives (and pocketbooks) are enriched accordingly.

Which brings me back to abundance. The traditional model would say that you can’t get qualified programmers to write code unless you pay them lots of money. I am currently surrounded by a number of amazing coders who are working on OpenNMS for free. The traditional model says that you can’t make something that appeals to a limited number of people, but numerous Kickstarter projects have shown that to be wrong and that there is a lot of money out there, but traditional markets haven’t been able to efficiently tap into it.

We are living in a time of abundance for those who are willing to look for it. I feel extremely blessed that OpenNMS has both survived all of these years and prospered, and I am exciting to see what the future brings.

Well, it is hard to believe that another Dev-Jam has come to a close.

I’m not lying when I say this is one of my favorite weeks of the year, and this one didn’t disappoint. A lot of code got written and OpenNMS 1.10 is much closer to becoming a reality.

Also, we inducted two new people into the Order of the Green Polo (OGP).

The OGP is the governing body of the OpenNMS Project, and new people must be voted in by the existing membership. This year Donald Desloge was inducted based, in part, on his work with the JasperReports integration, and Seth Leger joined the group on the strength of his IPv6 work.

Seth was involved in the OpenNMS project back before I was when he worked at Oculan, so it is nice to see someone with his background still working on it after ten years.

We’re already talking about next year.

Today started out with a Marshmallow Challenge exercise organized by Alex Finger.

He saw this originally presented as a TED talk. The idea is that you divide into teams, and each team is given 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and a single jumbo marshmallow. Each team has 18 minutes to elevate their marshmallow as high as possible by building a free standing structure using just those materials.

It was fun, although my team was robbed as Alex ignored the fact that Seth and Antonio’s structure fell over after time had expired and they had to set it back up, but I guess this is to be expected since Alex can be considered a French judge.

Sometimes life is not fair.

Anyway, the rest of the day was pretty cool. With so many people here from Europe we discussed opening a European office of the OpenNMS Group, and I think this is pretty close to happening. From the frequency of commits, lots of code is getting written, and folks seem to be having a great time.

Any Dev-Jam post wouldn’t be complete without talking about dinner. Chris Rodman at Papa John’s Pizza FedEx’d us some coupons for free pizza and wings, which went well with the evening’s Jason Straham film festival (Transporter and Transporter 2 ).

While very unstructured, we do try for some organization at Dev-Jam and it starts (and pretty much ends) with a morning standing scrum.

We had to switch to a standing scrum after the first day since people were so excited to be working together again, scrum was taking forever to complete. By making everyone stand, it helped shorten things considerably.

I spent the day updating the OpenNMS Wikipedia page. This was my first foray into editing Wikipedia, and while none of my edits have caused problems, we did end up having the page for The OpenNMS Group deleted rather quickly. Wikipedia has a policy of not including anything but notable companies (for which we don’t qualify) but I wanted to have a page there, not to promote The OpenNMS Group, but to better separate the .com side of the project from the .org. Oh well, I understand their reasoning, so all we need is about 30-40 independent articles on the OpenNMS Group to try again. (grin)

Toward the end of the day the room filled with the wonderful smell of smoked BBQ, courtesy of Mike Huot.

Once again we had an amazing meal, and I really appreciate the work he put into it.