OpenNMS Users Conference Registration Now Open

Last year, with the help of Nethinks in Germany, we held the first OpenNMS Users Conference. It was a lot of fun and so we’re doing it again this year, and registration is now open.

It will be held 6-7 May at the Le Meridien Parkhotel in Frankfurt.

Building on the success of the last conference, we’ve extended it to span two days instead of one. The first day will consist of presentations, while the second will be made up of workshops.

I am especially excited that most of the presentations are being given by end users of OpenNMS and not people either associated with the OpenNMS Group or the Order of the Green Polo. The workshops, however, feature a long list of well known contributors and should provide for a high level of technical training.

The cost for both days is 499€, but if you register by 10 March you can save 60€.

Space is limited so register early, and I look forward to seeing you there.

Open Source, Social Contracts and Running a Business

When I started my first company in 2002, I had a lot of previous employers to provide examples, both positive and negative, of how to run a business. At the time IBM and Hewlett-Packard were leaders in network management, so I could have modeled my business on them.

Instead I modeled it on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Many might think it was a strange choice, but it seems to have worked out well, at least for us.

First, they make a good product. This is of paramount importance in any business.

Second, they limited the amount of money the highest paid people could earn in salary. In their case, the highest paid person could not make more than seven times the lowest paid person.

I am constantly disgusted by executive salaries these days. Being a previous employee of NORTEL, now in bankruptcy, I find it highly ironic that the executives responsible for driving the company into the ground received huge retention bonus to keep them from leaving. In a just world they would have had no where to go, and particularly they would not be financially rewarded for poor performance.

To me a salary should exist to cover the basic necessities of living, but the real compensation should be based on the performance of the company. Let me stress that I want there to be no limits on overall compensation – if the company is doing well I want everyone’s “upside” to be unlimited. But getting a huge salary just for showing up feels wrong, especially if the company is doing poorly.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs ever, takes home a salary of just $1.

Back to Ben and Jerry’s. The one other thing they did that I admired was to donate a certain percentage of pre-tax profits to charity.

I like donating to charity, but I find that I am most eager to give to those organizations that are a) small and b) concerned directly with something I care about. Thus each year I give to the EFF, the FSF and the SFLC, plus a number of local charities.

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, we were shocked and saddened like most of the world. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. Luckily, the opportunity came in a most unexpected way.

Matt and Jeff (along with Alex) were hanging out in the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) when a man named Andris Bjornson joined and started asking questions about OpenNMS. It turns out that he works for an organization called Inveneo that supplies bandwidth in rural and under-served areas in the developing world. Haiti was the perfect example of a place that needed their services, since a lot of the relief effort is run by non-government organizations (NGOs), and they rely on communications in order to maximize the good they can do.

Haiti’s communications infrastructure, such as it was, was destroyed by the earthquake, and Inveneo is using wireless technology to provide a timely replacement. Of course they need some way to manage this infrastructure (as you can imagine, it is in high demand) and they chose OpenNMS.




Andris installing an antenna in Port au Prince (click for more pictures)

Andris has been using OpenNMS for awhile, but he had some questions and there were some issues in managing the radios they were using. The guys in the channel were more than happy to help out, but we wanted to be involved in a more formal way.

We decided to donate a commercial support contract to Inveneo to help them out in Haiti.

It’s pretty cool to be involved, at least in some small way, with getting Haiti back on its feet. It was also cool to have OpenNMS chosen from all possible apps out there to play a role.

You can read more about Inveneo and OpenNMS in this press release, and please consider donating to their efforts.

Open source has a large social component, and I have a theory that being involved in open source software makes one generally more interested in social issues. I want to hear from others about their experiences with social causes tied to open source. Jon “Maddog” Hall is also a fan of Inveneo, and I’d love to have more examples.

UPDATE: Here’s a network diagram of the Inveneo network, and the “How to Deploy” document mentions us by name.

Red Hat Launches opensource.com

The domain name opensource.org is owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but Red Hat owns opensource.com. In talking to friends of mine involved with the OSI, people have been wondering what Red Hat will do with it.

Now we know. Today they announced that opensource.com has been launched with a new site.

It looks pretty slick and is worth a poke around. As someone who holds open source concepts near and dear to my heart, I am always eager to see how they are promoted. After all, we did register fauxpensource.com as a reaction to the dilution of the term “open source” but at first glance I’m pretty happy with what I see on the new site. Now if I could just find some time to participate.

Health Savings Accounts

Note: My one reader outside of the US might have issues understanding the “purchase” of health care insurance and should probably skip this post.

I can remember how happy we were in March of 2005 to finally be able to offer health care as a benefit.

The OpenNMS Group is a company focused on the happiness of its employees since they are responsible for all of our revenue, and we don’t want anyone worrying about being sick or whether or not they should go to the doctor. We cover 100% of the employee’s insurance premium: medical, dental, disability, etc.

There is also the benefit of having a group plan so that the premiums for family plans (which we don’t cover) can come out of pre-tax dollars.

This has worked fine for over five years, and I’ve been happy with our provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Well, as happy as one can expect to be when dealing with an insurance company (I’m also happy with our lawyer, if you can believe that).

However, this year our premiums went up nearly 27%. This is more than twice what we usually see and it was strange since no one hit an age barrier (30-34, 35-39, 40-44, etc.) or had (as far as I know) a catastrophic illness. Think about it – the premiums would double every four years if this was a constant rate.

That’s about as bad as some of those open core license fees (grin).

Anyway, our options were to either pay more, consider having the employee shoulder some of the burden, or change plans. All of which are a bit of a pain.

But then our broker suggested a Health Savings Account (HSA) combined with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP).

An HSA is basically a savings plan, similar to a 401(k) retirement plan, that can only be used for health expenses. The HDHP is similar to a standard health plan with one main catch – no co-payments. This means if you go to the doctor, you play the insurance company’s negotiated rate in full. The same thing goes for prescription drugs. You pay everything up to the deductible, and then after that the insurance company covers 100% (or possibly less, but we’re looking at a 100% plan).

The HDHP premiums can be significantly less than the “normal” premiums.

The way this is supposed to work is the higher deductible means lower premiums, for both the company’s individual coverage and the employee’s family coverage. Both the company and the employee can fund the HSA, and the goal would be to put enough in the HSA to cover the deductible.

For example: supposed you have an HDHP with a $2500 deductible for an individual, and the company puts in $200 a month toward that account for $2400 a year. Any expenses up to $2400 are paid for, and the employee would only be responsible for the last $100 up to the deductible. Any expenses after that are fully covered.

Better yet, say you use only $500 of it, then there’d be $1900 left over for the future. And, while it isn’t much these days, these accounts can earn interest.

With families it is a little different, as the deductible tends to be doubled. In this case, the added savings of having a reduced premium can be applied to the HSA to cover that difference.

My favorite part is that there is nothing preventing you from contributing just the amount of your expenses to the HSA at the end of the year and immediately withdrawing it, tax free.

In the short term, an HSA that is funded by the company does not save much, if any, money for the company. But over time, as premiums increase, it could be possible to raise the deductible so that eventually it does, or is at least at parity.

The (small “L”) libertarian in me loves the idea. I like the fact that people can use as much or as little healthcare as they choose. Plus, any funds that have been accrued can be taken out at retirement age similar to an IRA (and also, hardship withdrawals with tax penalties are also available).

We’re still investigating whether this option is for us, but my current take on it is that most of the guys are for it.

Having a decent healthcare plan is important for any business in the United States, so I thought I’d share.

New Releases: OpenNMS 1.6.8 and OpenNMS 1.7.8

The latest stable and unstable releases for OpenNMS landed this week. Please use your install method of choice to upgrade. We are now on a two month cycle for releases, the last one being in October and the next one being in February. It is my sincere hope that the February release includes 1.7.90, the 1.8 release candidate, but with the holidays approaching I’m not 100% sure we’ll make it. Once 1.7.90 is out I expect two week release cycles until 1.8 is ready.

Version 1.6.8 includes a number of bug fixes and small features. One of the coolest things, in my opinion, is an easy installer. While I find OpenNMS simple to install, there are a couple of little things one has to do in order to get it up and running. We decided it would be cool to help automate or at least assist people with that process.

Version 1.7.8 is the next release in our march toward 1.8. More code was added and cleaned up, as well as a number of bugs fixed. I would definitely not use 1.7 in production unless you are very experienced with OpenNMS, but feel free to use it on a development system to see what were working on for 1.8.

OpenNMS UCE 2010 Call for Papers

After last year’s inaugural OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe, we want to do it again. We’re going to extend it to two days and hope to model it more on the Nagios Users Conference I attended in Nürnberg back in October. Ours will once again be held in Frankfurt, Germany.

If you are interested in presenting, the Call for Papers is now open. The author of any accepted paper will have their hotel costs covered.

There are two types of papers being sought. The first are presentations, which can be either of a technical nature (how to use the OpenNMS application) or a business nature (how to use OpenNMS to improve business processes). These should be about 45 minutes long with 15 minutes for discussion.

The second are workshops. We are seeking two hour workshops to cover hands-on examples with OpenNMS. This is a new feature in this year’s conference.

The deadline for submitting an abstract is 31 December 2009 and speakers will be notified on 31 January 2010.

Hope to see you there.

David Byrne and the "Internet Antichrist"

I don’t usually do this, but today I came across a long post by David Byrne that I thought was amazing. He analyzes the changes that the advent of the Internet has wrought. It’s worth a read.

To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.

New URLs for OpenNMS Blogs

Just a quick note to point out some changes to the OpenNMS blogs. We are really trying to get organized this year and we’ve hired a company to help us organize the OpenNMS wiki information. There is a lot of good stuff there but it is sometimes hard to find.

They have a number of suggestions and we are working to implement them, but they wanted us to make two small changes to our blogs.

The first was to move my blog out of the opennms.org domain. I rant on about a lot of things that aren’t project related and that may not interest the average OpenNMS user. So the new URL is https://www.adventuresinoss.com.

The second thing was that we had a number of separate blogs for certain members of the Order of the Green Polo. None of them had time to blog as much as I do, and with one exception blogging was very light. It takes a certain kind of loudmouth personality to actively blog, so rather than have multiple blogs to check we decided to combine them into one “development” blog. Sure you could always check planet.opennms.org but that still required separate logins for each blog if you wanted to comment. The new blog can be found at http://www.opennms.org/blog.

Anyway, for those three people who actively read this stuff I wanted to let you know about the changes. Please update your links/RSS feeds accordingly.