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Open Source Network Management Beats IBM and HP
mjhuot writes "Last week SearchNetworking.com announced their Product Leadership Awards for 2007. It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category. OpenNMS beat out the established players of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. This was based on a user survey of all IT solutions, not just open source; it demonstrates that open source software is indeed making inroads into the enterprise."
I have never used OpenNMS and don't know much about this product or any of the other commercial runner ups mentioned, but I noticed one thing from the OpenNMS homepage and that is that they have this OpenNMS Group which provides services, training and support for the product.
I think this is a model that more many other Open Source products would have a lot to gain from following.
One obvious benefit of this is that it allows the developers to get paid for working with the product, that way making it possible for some developers to spend more time with the product and they will be in very much direct contact with the users of the product, not only reading about the bugs in a Bugzilla. It allows for some the lead developers to really be devoted to the product which is a really big asset to any Open Source project where money can not be made from selling the program itself.
Another good thing about this is that it gives the companies who have to choose between products confidence that they can put some trust in that this project is not going to stop being developed because some key developer for some reason is leaving the project.
Of course some care have to be put into not making sure that model does not lead to one big costumer in the services, training and support department does not get to lead the development of the product, which could have negative side effects, but really I don't think the risk of this is too big, the worst that could happen from this is that the project gets forked, with one fork keeping on working for the "company version" of the product while the rest of the project goes in another direction, but if just the services, training and support groups follows the second group then whatever company can hire people to work on the company version of the product. It just means more good Open Source code and good jobs for OS developers, the GNU license should make sure that a company can not take the code and make it into a closed source project.
Grrr. We've been on Slashdot before but man, this sucks. OpenNMS sent me an alarm (and the fact that I can't get to my mail also alerted me) but what can you do. Usually Rackspace does a good job and I've opened a support ticket to see if they can do anything about it. Sorry.