Adventures in Open Source

I am back from my holiday in Fiji and New Zealand, but not fully back in spirit. That should change over the next week as I get back into the swing of things and it will take awhile to dig out from under the pile of e-mail and news.

We heard about the attacks in Mumbai, of course, but were shielded from most of the news coverage since we didn’t watch television or get on the Internet for much of the trip. My best wishes go out to those people affected, and I know that there are probably a couple of OpenNMS users in that group. In more bad news, a friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer in my absence, but I have no doubt that he’ll pull through. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

It’s also December and the holiday season is upon us. Again, I’m not quite in the spirit as I just spent time in really warm, really sunny places, which is not the norm for December in North Carolina.

Believe it or not I didn’t think too much about OpenNMS during my vacation. When at home it occupies most of my waking thoughts and quite a few of my dreams, so I was surprised that I was able to unplug as much as I did. A good portion of that was due to the lack of Internet access. As much as I love the network and the opportunities it provides, it has really eroded the divisions between the work place and personal life, sometimes called the “work/life balance“. I’m pretty much in my office whether or not I’m actually there, at home or on the road. It takes getting out well out of my element for me to get away from it all, and this trip made that happen.

It was 44 hours from the moment we left Wellington until I got home, but the trip went as well as could have been hoped. I was surprised at the number of people on the domestic flights, but then I realized that it was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend which is known as the busiest travel weekend of the year. I have to agree with Louis CK that we don’t appreciate air travel as much as we should.

I wish I could do it more often, but a two week holiday once every other year is about all I can manage. I think the Europeans have it right when it comes to time away from work. I scrambled to see as much of New Zealand as I could in 10 days, and even limiting myself to the north island I missed a lot. During my stay I met a couple from Belgium and a man from Holland who were both spending five weeks in the country, which is more reasonable.

I did get to meet one OpenNMS user for lunch while in New Zealand. Daniel Lawson lives in Hamilton which was on our way out of Auckland.

It makes travel fun to know that almost anywhere I go I can run into someone from the community. Next stop: Chicago. Why do I always end up there in winter?

When I first started my own business around OpenNMS, I figured it would be a one man consulting shop. I’d work about half time and then take the rest of the time off to do other things.

It didn’t work out that way.

My clients wanted support, and that meant someone (i.e. me) had to be around all the time. Instead of having some time to myself I had no time. This went on for a number of years. I can remember missing the funeral of my favorite uncle because I had a client coming to town for training and I couldn’t cancel at that late date. It was just the way it was.

As OpenNMS grew I was able to take some time off. I hired other people and so I could get away for the occasional long weekend. Or, more accurately, I was able to take weekends off now and then. We have traditionally closed the office from Christmas to New Year’s Day, but even then I tend to work part days during that time just to stay caught up.

Last year was the turning point. We got a client in Hawaii, so I had to head out there for a week. My wife insisted on coming along, and after talking about it with the other folks in the company I decided to take my first two week vacation in … well … pretty much forever. No e-mail, no phone calls, no meetings. Just some time to relax and regroove my brain.

It was fun, so we decided to do it again this year. Since I travel often I get lots of frequent flyer miles, and I had enough for a trip to New Zealand for two. I’ve always wanted to go there. However, the seats go fast so you have to book as early as possible, so I booked a flight for this November back in December of 2007.

When the airline was routing us to New Zealand, they had us stopping over in a place called Nadi. Now, I don’t have a problem going to “naughty” on holiday, but I’d never heard of it before and asked where it was. It turns out that this is the major international airport for Fiji. Fiji sounded cool, so we decided to spend a few days there before heading on to New Zealand.

So starting tomorrow I will be gone for two weeks. As much as I love working on OpenNMS I will not be checking my e-mail, or the lists, or bugzilla, or anything remotely related to work. I’ll be snorkeling on a coral reef or trout fishing in a mountain stream but it won’t have anything to do with the OpenNMS project.

I’m even leaving my laptop at home. This does not mean that I will be without electronic gear, however. I am bringing at least two small gadgets with me.

The first is a Garmin GPS. One thing I like about the Garmin is that it is supported by the New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project. Instead of shelling out US$150 for maps I’m using the work of this group. It was pretty easy to install, and the addresses I looked up for the B&B in Auckland and Zorb were both there. I’ll report on how it goes. While I seem to make it a habit to visit countries where they drive on the left side of the road, this will be the first time I’ve actually done it. I learned from my trip to Australia not to follow the traffic circle directions from the Garmin (as they have you going counter-clockwise in these countries which will get you killed).

The second is a new iPod Touch. While I disagree with the degree of control Apple exercises with the App Store, I haven’t seen a better mobile browser, and I just can’t stay away from the ‘net for that long.

The best news is that the second generation Touch supports a microphone. I had been waiting and waiting for Apple to release its version, but with my trip just days away I went looking for other options.

I found it in a product from Fastmac. They sell an adapter that lets you insert a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack (with two rings) which terminates in a three ring connector that supports a built in microphone. Combined with Fring, a free app from the App Store that allows you to use Skype (among other things) I should be able to make Skype calls if need be. It arrived today and works fine, so I’m set.

To everyone in the community, hold down the fort while I’m gone. Try as I might, I won’t be able to keep my mind totally off the project, but I am going to give it my best shot.

I just wanted to say thanks to one of our clients in Chicago who sent us this nice Cisco 48-port manageable switch for the OpenNMS lab.

I had posted a question on the discuss list about manageable switches and they had one they were phasing out. Now if anyone has a decent SPARC system they want to get rid of …

When I was at the Linux Live show in London, I was introduced to yet another social networking site called Lintopia.

I don’t know much about it, but I registered and thought I’d share it. It aims to be a site for people involved in open source software. I haven’t had time to see what it offers over other sites that might be open source specific except for the “project” section (I added OpenNMS).

The only social networking site I somewhat frequent is LinkedIn (and to a lesser degree the more European-centic Xing) so I’m not sure what will happen with Lintopia, but its open source focus at least makes it interesting to me so I thought it might interest others..

I got to chat with Jay Lyman of the 451 Group today. Most analysts (with the exception of Coté) tend to ignore our little ol’ project but the 451 Group likes to get in touch every several months or so.

It was fun to think and talk about the market for open source management tools for awhile, and I also wanted to find out who came up with the term “open core” (apparently it was Andrew Lampitt). I first saw it used in a 451 CAOS Theory blog post by Matthew Aslett.

As my three readers know, I have a bug up my skirt about the “hybrid” open source companies, where part of the code is closed off but part is open. I call it the “shareware” model where some of the functionality it open but you have to buy a commercial closed license to get all of the features.

I won’t rehash all of the reasons why I hate this model being referred to as “open source software” but I would like to focus on the term “open core software”. In my mind it is more descriptive of what the hybrid companies are doing than “open source” and it doesn’t have the negative connotation that “shareware” brings to mind.

So I plan to steal it.

I don’t think that you’ll see “open core network management” any time soon in the marketing literature of these companies. “Open source” is a much more valuable term, but “open core” is at least a more honest approach, meant to represent a company that releases the core of their product under an open source license but generates revenue as a vendor of proprietary additions to that core.

Jay asked me how our business was doing in the wake of the worldwide recession, and I said that on the whole things were okay. Fourth quarter is usually strong for us, and this year is no exception, but currently we have a lot of projects sitting in limbo. Everything has been approved but most of the large companies we are dealing with are holding their breath on spending in any form. We’re still seeing 40% to 45% year over year growth, which is a lot less than some of the open core companies are reporting, but then again we’ve been seeing that for four years now and they just haven’t been around that long.

He also asked what I thought about the business prospects for the open core guys and I had to admit that they don’t look that great from where I sit. Since they tend to compete on cost, there are at least three main pressures that are going to be bearing down on them in the next few months.

First, pressure from the established commercial players. Sure, the open source part of their product is free, and it is hard to beat free, but what about their commercial part - the part that they sell to keep the doors open? A small OpenNMS customer has a network of 1000 devices. Some of the open core vendors charge per device, on the order of US$250 to US$500. So this translates to US$250K to US$500K per year. One can usually get a Tivoli or OpenView solution for 1000 nodes at much less than that. Will someone go with the newcomer or the established player when the established player costs less?

Now, everyone realizes that there is no one out there paying those prices for the new guys. If you have a 1000 node network you can easily negotiate them down to a fraction of the list price as they are desperate to get new clients. And for some people getting 90% off of a price that was made up in the first place is a deal. But if what they are buying are “ease of use” features the second source of pressure will be from the smaller commercial players like Solarwinds. Why pay US$25K a year when you can get a complete out of the box solution for slightly less than that and only pay for it once? Orion runs on Windows, it is very pretty and it is reasonably priced. And you don’t have to deal with that pesky open source stuff.

The third source of pressure comes from the pure-play open source guys. A couple of years ago I had dinner with Peter Fenton, a smart VC with Benchmark. He told me that a product really needs to “own the bottom”. I didn’t agree with him and pointed out things like Mercedes Benz that sell to the top. I was told by others that I wasn’t supposed to argue with the VC, but I did anyway and in the end he convinced me he was right. After all, Mercedes had to seriously reinvent itself when Lexus came to market with a similar product at a lower price.

By having a totally free alternative, users of other products will constantly question their need to pay for commercial software. In many cases, like the small and medium businesses that use Orion, something like OpenNMS isn’t quite for them. But for others, products like OpenNMS provide a real alternative to their current solutions.

Most of the open core players are VC funded, and eventually those VCs will want to cash out. To do that they need to increase revenue. Thus you can expect those low, low, introductory prices to go away, and when companies find out the real cost for the open core software they will be looking for alternatives. They will be looking toward the bottom.

In the meantime we plan to keep running OpenNMS profitably. This means that year after year it will keep getting better, and slowly but surely the pressure on those other solutions will just keep building.

For those companies it is a race; a race to build themselves up and get acquired before they lose their customer base. It is hard to compete against the bottom, which was the point Peter was trying to make. I think Sun’s current lack of success with MySQL has made everyone a bit cautious about open source acquisitions, and with the current economic climate I don’t expect that to change any time soon. In that context the prospects for open core companies don’t look so rosy to me.