Adventures in Open Source

The following post is a little long, so I figured it might be best to put the “point” upfront. The OpenNMS Group has acquired the copyright to the original OpenNMS code. Thus, for the first time in seven years, all of the OpenNMS copyright is held under one organization.

I didn’t start OpenNMS. It was started by three guys named Steve Giles, Luke Rindfuss and Brian Weaver. They formed a company called PlatformWorks that did the initial OpenNMS code framework, and they grew to include such OpenNMS icons as Shane O’Donnell and our very own Ben Reed.

Platformworks was acquired by a company called Atipa, which later morphed into Oculan. Oculan brought to market a network management appliance that was based on OpenNMS with some additional functionality built in and a high level of support (each appliance would periodically “phone home” reporting problems, getting upgrades, etc.) but they had no business focused directly on OpenNMS.

Since there was a lot of interest in OpenNMS as a platform, in September of 2001 I was brought on board to build a services and support business around it. The first OpenNMS support customer signed on in December of that year, and I’m happy to say they are still a customer.

In May of 2002 Oculan received new investment, and the decision was made to focus solely on the appliance. OpenNMS 1.0 had just been released, but Oculan was no longer going to provide resources to maintain it.

Having worked at that point in time for nearly 15 years in network management, I saw the potential in OpenNMS. I also knew that if no one stepped up, the project would most likely die. So I went into Steve Giles’ office and asked for OpenNMS. We talked for a bit, and then he looked at his watch and said if I was off his payroll by Friday, I could have OpenNMS and a couple of servers.

That was the easy part. The hard part was explaining to my wife that I was starting my own business selling free software. Note to all you newlyweds out there - I have learned that this is one of those decisions you need to make together. Don’t forget that.

“Getting” OpenNMS meant little more than getting the name, being promoted to “admin” for OpenNMS on various sites, and the “opennms.*” domain names. I did not get the copyright to the OpenNMS code, since Oculan viewed that as their intellectual property (IP). I didn’t really care, since I was planning on publishing all future changes under the GPL, and that’s what I did.

While OpenNMS kept growing, albeit slowly, Oculan flared brightly but then went away. They closed their doors in May of 2004.

In September of 2004, The OpenNMS Group came into existence with myself, David Hustace and Matt Brozowski as founders. We’ve seen amazing growth with our “spend less than you earn” business plan, and even managed to hire Ben Reed, one of the original OpenNMS guys. And we did it all with GPL’d software.

However, not owning the copyright has presented us with some issues. First, it is hard to provide indemnification if you don’t own 100% of the code. And second, it makes defending the theft of your code difficult.

Last year we hired Moglen Ravicher, the law team behind the Software Freedom Law Center, to represent us as we pursued some “irregularities” with the use of OpenNMS code by Cittio in their Watchtower product. OpenNMS is a Java program published without a classpath exception, so simply importing OpenNMS code into a program makes the program a derivative work (note that Sun’s openjdk is published with a classpath exception for this very reason) and it looked like, at a minimum, that is what Cittio was doing.

Cittio’s initial response was that if they were using OpenNMS, it was only OpenNMS 1.0, for which we did not hold the copyright. And since we didn’t own the copyright, we could not pursue any copyright violations.

I have my doubts as to whether or not that was a true statement, but it had the desired effect of stopping our legal action. The Oculan IP had bounced around a bit, and landed at Raritan, so I contacted them to see if they would join in our lawsuit. With both Raritan and OpenNMS together, their excuse would become moot.

Unfortunately, we found out that the Free Software Foundation had a complaint with the way Raritan was using some GPL’d code in one of their appliances. This was definitely accidental, but the fact remained that we could not move forward until this matter was resolved. Due to the age of the code it was hard for Brett Smith and his team at the FSF to verify that the changes Raritan had made resulted in compliance, and so it took a year before Raritan and the FSF agreed that everything had been addressed.

Now that we could move forward, Cittio abruptly closed its doors and sold its assets to Nimsoft. Nimsoft contacted us to make sure that we were satisfied that no OpenNMS code would be involved in the code they were salvaging from Watchtower, and while I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, I believe that will be the case.

There was really no reason to continue to pursue Cittio, since with any failed company even a favorable judgement would have us getting in line behind all the other creditors, so we decided it was best just to let it end.

During this year that I worked with Raritan, I was impressed at how eager they were to both resolve their issues with the FSF as well as work with our small company. They could have sold Cittio a license to OpenNMS and made it very difficult for us to pursue any action but instead they stuck by us.

In the seven years since OpenNMS effectively was forked, the products have taken extremely different paths, thus with no real conflict of interest at hand I approached Raritan about buying the copyright to the original 1.0 code. We worked out an agreement and now the OpenNMS code is wholly owned by The OpenNMS Group, while Raritan has a license to continue to use the code in their products.

This is both exciting and scary to me. First of all, we are now in debt for the first time, although we hope to have that paid off as quickly as possible. Second, we now can truly offer indemnity to our support clients. Finally, as we move forward and investigate investment in order to grow, there is some IP for an investor to value, instead of just the good looks and fine wit of our team.

This will not change the lives of the average OpenNMS user one bit. If you check out the code you will see some changes in the copyright header, but that’s it. Do not expect to see new, proprietary “enterprise extensions” like the fauxpen source guys. In fact, we plan to reorganize part of the code and publish it with a “classpath” exception to allow for the easier addition of monitors and collectors, etc. Thus we hope to make OpenNMS even more free.

OpenNMS is growing at an amazing rate this year, but nothing that happens will ever change my two requirements for the project: OpenNMS will always be free (under an OSI-approved license) and OpenNMS will never suck.

Thanks for being a part of making that happen.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I spent last week in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale, to be exact) and it kept me so busy that I wasn’t able to find the time to write anything.

I’ve been to this area of California dozens of times, but I can barely suppress my delight at seeing the headquarters of all those tech companies. Just driving around for lunch is a veritable Who’s Who of the industry. Seriously, as we went to In-N-Out one day we drove past a building that had a sign out front for a company I’ve been talking to for a couple of months about using OpenNMS, but we had never met in person. I dropped them an e-mail and we went out for dinner on Thursday. Too cool.

The company I was working for was right across the street from Palm.

Speaking of Palm, I’m still trying to decide on a new phone. The Palm Pre is out to relatively positive reviews. There is always the iPhone, but until AT&T gets their femtocell solution figured out it is not an option for me. A friend of mine at Google hooked me up with a G1 Android-powered phone, but one of my requirements has to be an easy way to sync my calendar and contacts from my Mac.

From what I can tell, the only way to easily sync your contacts with a G1 is to sync them through Google. I’m enough of a privacy nut that I really don’t want to have my address book on a server I don’t control, so that option is out. For the Pre there appears to be a Missing Sync that’ll work, so that is an option. Bah, I think I just hold off for a few months and see what else comes up.

One thing I really liked about being back in California was the plethora of places to eat. My throat has been bothering me lately, so it was nice to be able to get a big hot bowl of Pho.

On the way to the restaurant I saw a very typically California sign on a post:

I hope they find it.

Tuesday night I got to meet up with a friend of mine from high school named Geoff Davis.

He’s doing some interesting things at Google, and plus we got to try this great Thai place in Mountain View.

We talked past the last shuttle back to San Francisco, so I ended up driving him back to his place in the Haight. It was nice coming over that last ridge on the 101 and seeing the city skyline. I think there will always be a special place in my heart for San Francisco.

On Friday I made plans to meet up with John Mark Walker in San Mateo. Neither of us realized it at the time, but they were having a “wine walk” street faire so it took awhile to find a place to park. As I was waiting for him I wandered around a bit, and came across this Porsche 550. I’m not sure it was authentic, since they are extremely rare and worth north of US$1 million, but it was in any case a nice looking car.

We ate at this Indian place and got caught up on gossip in our little world of open source. He will be moderating a panel with me, Luke Kanies and Michael Coté at the LinuxWorld reboot called OpenSourceWorld in August.

I’m not sure what he was planning with the knife.

I made it home with little trouble on Saturday, ending my third trip out west in six weeks. In addition to the trip in August for the conference, I have only one more short trip to New York City scheduled, so perhaps I’ll get to sleep in my own bed for a change.

I love the Internet. I just got called an asshole (well “@#*hole”) by a famous person on Twitter. Not that it is the worse thing I’ve ever been called, but I think it is delightful that someone I’ve never met is able to sum up my personality in so few characters.

The famous person is Nigel Lythgoe, once a producer of the American Idol TV show. I know him best as the producer/judge on So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), a dance competition show that I rarely miss. As someone who knows absolutely nothing about dance, it is amazing that I like this show so much. One of the reasons is that it tends to have a nicer tone than shows like Idol, and the judges seem to realize that their final cut of contestants are all pretty damn talented, thus their criticism is constructive and every cut is a little bit painful.

Now, unless you’ve been in a cave or “hiking the Appalachian Trail”, you are aware that Michael Jackson passed away this week. At 43 I’m close enough to 50 to say that, for anyone, that is a life too short.

I was never a fan of Michael Jackson’s music, but I recognized that he was talented. A friend of mine in college who was contemporary dancer, went to see his movie Moonwalker and I was teasing her about it (where I went to college most of us were musical fascists and would deride anything that didn’t fit into our definition of “good music”). She laughed and said while that his music was definitely pop, he was an amazing dancer, and I can understand that for people in dance his passing is a great loss.

Note: for all of you geeks out there, Mr. Jackson has a patent.

Unfortunately my bullshit meter is pegged by a lot of the “tribute” stories I’m seeing on TV. Plus, I’ve been so inundated with Michael Jackson music that “Billie Jean” is currently a two-day long earworm living in my head (they even had a bluegrass version of it on Back Porch last night).

I follow Mr. Lythgoe on Twitter, and he is trying to organize a Michael Jackson tribute show for SYTYCD (and has talked about little else in the last couple of days). If anyone can do it, I expect he can, as American Idol got permission to use his music two seasons ago, and in fact they are re-running that very episode on Monday.

While I have no doubt that Mr. Lythgoe is trying to honor Mr. Jackson with the Idol repeat (the first Idol repeat in prime time, ever, I believe) and his desire to have a show dedicated to his dance styles on SYTYCD, I had the temerity to suggest on Twitter that all of this flurry of activity might look “slightly opportunistic”. It was simply my advice as an outsider that he should be aware of it. Think about it - if Mr. Jackson’s influence on dance was so important, why wait until now to have a show about it? Wouldn’t it have been at the top of the list when the producers were getting permission to use his music on Idol? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do it, but there needs to be a certain tone around the show to prevent it from being seen as just a cheap grab at ratings.

For that I am now labeled an “@#*hole”.

Maybe I struck too close to home. Trust me, in 30 days, sad as it is, very little will be in the news about Mr. Jackson. We, as a culture, just don’t have the attention span for it. If you are in the business of news, stories about Michael Jackson are hot right now. If there will be a Michael Jackson version of SYTYCD, trust me, it’ll be as soon as it possibly can be done.

So what does this have to do with open source? Well, unpleasant as it may be, it is extremely important to listen to what your critics are saying. It is easy to dismiss them as a bunch of assholes, but you do it at your own peril. In many cases they echo the thoughts of people you need to reach, and understanding how they think is the first step.

For example, my experience with open source seems to be 180 degrees in the opposite direction from Matt Asay. For better or worse, Mr. Asay is seen as a spokesperson for open source software by some, and I have to be able to respond to his ideas, which range from the bleeding obvious to the downright asinine (with a little truth thrown in to help make them seem legit). While I try not to “feed the trolls” by commenting too much, it is important to my business to understand how people like him think.

In any case I sent that tweet to Mr. Lythgoe with the best intentions and got labeled an asshole. So be it. I would rather have my actions misunderstood and get called names than to be seen trying to make a buck off a dead guy.

A couple of weeks ago we found out that OpenNMS has been nominated for a Sourceforge.net Community Choice award as “The Best Tool for the Enterprise”. Many thanks to everyone who nominated us, and I hope you’ll vote for us once more.

As part of the voting process, Ross Turk asked us why we should win this award. I can think of a number of reasons (well, beyond the fame and huge monetary prize), but the main one is that OpenNMS is an example of what can be accomplished with a small but dedicated group of people and the open source development model. OpenNMS can compete with products from companies like IBM and HP, which are orders of magnitude larger, and yet remain 100% free and open software. While there is a commercial company behind the project, it has survived on the business model of “spend less than you earn” and has not accepted outside investment. There is no need for a special, proprietary “enterprise” version of the software - the only OpenNMS version is the enterprise version. There are people out there who believe that it is not possible to create enterprise-grade software under the open source model without some sort of proprietary software “extensions”, but if you understand it and can be true to your community, open source works, which is why I’d like to see us win this award.

Another thing that Ross asked us to do was to make a video showcasing the project. We had a lot of fun with it, and it is now up on YouTube:

As much as I’d like us to win this award, I’m not optimistic. Seriously, the previous winners have included OpenOffice, Firebird and Zimbra - all of which have much more money and many more users than OpenNMS. However, it was worth going through the whole process if just to create this video. I’ve been hoping to capture what it is like to be a part of a vibrant open source community, if just to be able to explain it to others, and this is pretty close to perfection. Many thanks to Jeff and his friend Robbie for pulling an all-nighter to get this done.

At one point in time back in 2002, the “formal” OpenNMS team consisted of just me on my farm in rural North Carolina. Now we have over 20 people in the Order of the Green Polo and over 40 committers. In this video we have people of all shapes and sizes from around the United States as well as four other countries (Venezuela, France, Italy and the UK). For someone like myself with few talents outside of a big mouth, it humbles me to see so much involvement on this project, and it is a honor to be able to work on it with these people.

Check out the video, and for those of you who can’t commit to ten minutes, we’ve also made a one minute trailer, also on YouTube:

If you need a laugh to start your week, at least check that out, and remember to vote.

Last September I wrote about my Citibank business credit card being cancelled due to the number being reported as compromised. Well, it’s happened again. Yesterday both Jeff and I were informed that our card numbers were possibly stolen and that Citi would have to issue new ones. No word yet on my personal card.

While this is slightly inconvenient, what really pisses me off is that Citibank will not reveal the name of the merchant who allowed the security breach. I believe I have a right to know and to possibly avoid using that merchant in the future, but no matter how hard I pressed, the agent I talked to either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell.

It’s almost enough to make me change banks, and I thought it funny that when the agent signed off with “Thanks for using Citi” it came across as “$hitty”.

I do like the fact that Citi was proactive in contacting me and closing the account, but the fact that they are willing to hide the identity of the real culprit bothers me. The merchant should be held accountable. At OpenNMS, when we take credit cards we use a system that does not store the number or any detailed information once the payment is processed. I can honestly tell our customers that their payment information is not stored by us.

So, did anyone else get “the call” and have to replace their credit cards? Is there some information that I’m missing (as a Google search doesn’t turn up anything recent)?

(sigh)