opennms

InfoWorld's two minds on open source's value

Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.

The politics reveal themselves when InfoWorld tries to settle on a winner between Zenoss and OpenNMS. (Why Hyperic isn't also in that mix, or Reductive Labs' Puppet, I can't fathom, but...)

The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):

Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source … Read more

Flash! Hyperic acquires OpenNMS to get vigintillions of customers

It's not just the big kids anymore. In JBoss-esque fashion, Hyperic just announced the acquisition of OpenNMS, a leading network management platform. Not content to compete anymore, the two decided to throw in the towel and make love, not war.

Erm...yeah.When pressed for comment, John Mark Walker, community lead at Hyperic, offered the following:

We look forward to the first release of the HyperNMS product, codenamed Tofu Bar-B-Que, which is just the sort of interoperability only possible between two open-source projects.

I can feel the synergies raging!

(And yes, it's a joke. I was taken in … Read more

Is Cittio ripping off the OpenNMS community?

There are a lot of allegations flying around relative to Cittio's (allegedly improper) use of the OpenNMS code without contributing code back, in apparent violation of the GPL. The best post on the subject is this one, in my opinion.

It reminds us of a few things:

We don't actually know how Cittio is using OpenNMS, in part because Cittio is keeping the whole thing under wraps and has been very sneaky about it. Regardless of #1, Cittio would have to be clever indeed to have found a way to bury GPL code in their proprietary product without giving a single line of code back to the OpenNMS project. No matter #2, Cittio's stripmining of the OpenNMS community is in poor form. Irrespective of #3, Cittio apparently doesn't let its customers know that it is shipping them GPL code. I bet those customers would like to know this and, as a lawyer, I'd strongly suggest that Cittio has a duty to inform its customers of this fact.

Ultimately, as Tarus Balog (founder of OpenNMS) notes, open source is a matter of trust. Cittio has demonstrated that it knows little about open source and deserves precious little trust.

Cittio is a parasite. Tarus wrote to me:… Read more