OpenNMS Celebrates 10 Years

mjhuot writes "Quite often is it claimed that pure open source projects can't survive, much less grow and create robust code. One counter example of this is OpenNMS, the world's first enterprise-grade network management application platform developed under the open source model. Registered on 30 March 2000 as project 4141 on Sourceforge, today the gang threw a little party, with members virtually attending from around the world. With the right business savvy and a great community, it is possible to both remain 100% free and open source while creating enough value to make a good living at it."

Comments

Re:i had no idea my GNU tools were so rinkadink

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically everyone who has seen the hundreds of thousands of dead open source projects at Freshmeat, Sourceforge and Google Code.

There are a very small number of truly successful open source projects. Most projects, regardless of whether they're open source or not, don't succeed. To think otherwise is foolish.

Re:i had no idea my GNU tools were so rinkadink

[0100010001010011]

You don't have to be successful to survive.

I have a few "projects" out on Mathwork's site. I wouldn't call them full fledged "projects" but snippets of functionality that saved myself a ton of time and now they're hopefully saving other people time.

BSD licensed, anyone can do with the code what they want, if I die tomorrow the code will still survive without me. (Hline and Vline are probably the two functions that should be built in, but they were uploaded and last updated in 2001.)

I've found a ton of nifty projects at github that maybe didn't do what I wanted, but had pieces of code I used. It's what motivated me to get one myself. Until github goes under, anyone who wants to see how I've implemented my bashrc scripts can. Just like I borrowed code from someone else's bashrc project. Sounds 'survived' to me.

10 years?

[pushing-robot]

So by traditional open source versioning... they should be... almost to 1.0 by now?

Well..

[mikkelm]

OpenNMS never really seemed "enterprise-grade" to me. Yeah, it does a lot, but it takes a lot to get it to do so. New code is not always up to par, and you get a bunch of caveats with almost every feature of the application. If you've got a nerd-in-the-basement type who you can dedicate to building and maintaining the NMS, then you might be fine, but you won't have any account manager at the other end to yell at when things cease to function. Personally I believe that the NMS should exist to lessen the load of network upkeep, not introduce even more upkeep.

Re:Well..

[Ranger Rick]

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the OpenNMS developers.)

Depends on what you do in your enterprise. OpenNMS does a lot of useful stuff out of the box, but is a platform first, and an application second. OpenNMS's biggest strength is the breadth of ways to integrate it with other tools, and huge scalability (we have installations collecting millions of data points every 5 minutes, and monitoring devices with 50k interfaces each without breaking a sweat, replacing failing OpenView installations in large telcos). New features are new features, and we're pretty conservative in the scope of features that get put into the even (stable) releases. If you're running unstable, well, they're new features, and sometimes there are bugs... All a part of developing in the fish bowl.

And you don't need an account manager at the other end to yell at when you can get immediate support from someone with intimate knowledge of the system, that's how we've survived as a company while remaining true to being 100% open source software. No BS, just support which is all "level 3." Not that we typically have things that just cease to function without provocation, but without a bug report it's hard to answer that particular comment. ;)

Re:Well..

[jgehlbach]

Network management is hard. It's a part of the design that the effort is front-loaded: if you plan ahead and organize what gets monitored and collected according to rules, then the effort involved in adding nodes down the road approaches zero. It's an approach that doesn't make sense for everybody's environment, and you should absolutely use what works for you. All kinds of people find that OpenNMS works for them; a few who have written up their stories are listed here: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/OBP As for having somebody "to yell at", The OpenNMS Group sponsors the project and provides support, consulting, training, and custom development for OpenNMS; check opennms.com for details (disclosure: I'm an employee). We make two promises about OpenNMS: 1. It will never suck 2. It will always be Free (as in Freedom)

Re:Well..

[Galactic Dominator]

Yeah, it does a lot, but it takes a lot to get it to do so.

Sounds exactly like "enterprise-grade" to me.

New code is not always up to par

What? You mean in the development branch?

Re:i had no idea my GNU tools were so rinkadink

[spazdor]

By a parallel argument, I could point at the vast litany of failed dot-com enterprises and conclude that "Internet entrepreneurial ventures can't survive, much less grow and create successful websites."

The point is We're not really concerned with the average outcome here. If the bottom 99% of FOSS projects are failures and the top 1% are unmitigated successes, we can't really characterize FOSS as 99% fail.

10 years on Sourceforge

[stox]

It was around a few years before it moved to Sourceforge. If memory serves correct, at least 1998, if not older.

Re:Depends upon your definition of success

[hedwards]

Mmmm, soylent source. Now with 15% more dead code.