By RangerRick, on March 26th, 2008%
I’m in the lucky position that I get to work on open-source software for a living. Not only that, but I work with a group of people who really believe in open-source software as more than just an alternate business strategy — it’s a philosophy that benefits everyone involved.
OpenNMS is completely open-source. There’s no whacky $50-per-node “enterprise” version with extra features — we put it all out there, and we stake our reputations on being the people you contact when you need something more than community support on the mailing list. The code is open, and anyone can become an OpenNMS consultant if they want. To survive as a services company, we have to be good at what we do, and not just keep the code hostage and force customers to go through us to get things done. We have to work our butts off to remain the go-to experts on OpenNMS.
That’s what makes it frustrating when we see our code, and the code of lots of other contributors appear to be misused. The whole point of the GPL is that everyone benefits from improvements made to the . . . → Read More: When “Do No Evil” Is Not Enough
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By RangerRick, on March 14th, 2008%
I am honored, giddy, and totally stoked to announce that OpenNMS was accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2008!
The student application process starts next Monday, March 24th, so there’s still time to get prepped, and suggest some ideas for projects on our wiki, or even get a head start on getting involved in the community and working on code.
Thanks again for everyone who’s offered to mentor, come up with ideas, and volunteered their time!
In other news, we’re gearing up for a 1.6 beta1 release hopefully sometime this week. We have a list of bugs we’d like to knock out before the beta, but many of those will probably fall through to the next beta milestone. Look forward to a release, there’s a lot of good stuff getting cleaned up and fixed since 1.3.11!
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By RangerRick, on March 4th, 2008%
So Tarus posted about Cittio and their potential GPL violations last night, and it made Slashdot this morning. Once again I was reminded why I haven’t read Slashdot comments for a number of years. 😉
It all boils down to a bunch of people saying:
“OMG Get a lawyer!!!!” “It’s the GPL, you’re not a customer, they don’t have to tell you anything! Shut up!” …and… “DUDE. They totally say they use OpenNMS RIGHT HERE!”
Yes, they do mention OpenNMS on that page. They also say they use OpenNMS 1.0.2 which is either unfortunate for them, or very likely modified in a way that doesn’t appear to be communicated to customers.
By the time I posted a response clarifying things, it was too late and it’s buried way deep in the comments, so I would like to reiterate it here:
“So what’s all this then?”
Well, that link says they’re running OpenNMS 1.0.2, which, given the questions Cittio employees have asked on the OpenNMS mailing lists in the past, seems very unlikely (although technically possible). If they *are* using 1.0.2, they very . . . → Read More: On the Potential of GPL Violations
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By RangerRick, on February 21st, 2008%
It has been 3 years and 10 days since the last OpenNMS development cycle closed and a stable version was released, and the OpenNMS landscape looked very different then.
There had not yet been a Dev-Jam. The professional services company for OpenNMS had only had more than 1 employee for about a year. The codebase was half the size it is now. Most importantly, the community was really only getting started.
Tarus took a big chance going off on his own to continue the OpenNMS codebase when the now-defunct Oculan Corporation discontinued their open-source services business and continued on developing a closed-source network management appliance, and it takes a long time to gain the trust of userbase. There is plenty of open-source software out there — but while most open-source software has users, plenty of projects never develop a real community.
OpenNMS has grown a lot in 3 years. Not only has the general userbase bloomed, but the Order of the Green Polo (the “subject matter experts” of OpenNMS) has grown to a whopping 19 people. Considering it’s a codebase that (at least at the start) was . . . → Read More: OpenNMS is Accelerating
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By RangerRick, on February 20th, 2008%
Now that KDE 3.5.9 is out, I’ve updated all of the Fink KDE/X11 packages to match it. Nothing new specific to Mac OS X or Fink, just a version bump with some bugfixes and a significantly updated kdepim.
It also includes a few things that are updated to understand Chris’s new libflac package.
As always, let me know if you run into any issues.
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By RangerRick, on February 14th, 2008%
Had a good time at SCaLE — seemed like a lot of folks were interested in OpenNMS there. Of course, we found a bug in 1.3.10 as soon as it was out the door so I actually did another release during the conference. Fun!
Also fixed a long-standing bug with kdepim building on leopard; It should work now. If there are any other KDE3 build issues on Leopard, please let me know. I’m in the process of updating the packages to the upcoming 3.5.9 release.
Also, I see qt-copy is now a 4.4 snapshot so hopefully if I can get another snapshot build going, we’ll have native QuickTime audio. (woot)
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By RangerRick, on February 2nd, 2008%
So today we’re trying our first Bug Day at OpenNMS. It’s a chance to do a big push to get things verified/closed for the upcoming 1.3.10 release, which is shaping up to fix quite a few annoying bugs as well as add a number of new features.
If you’re interested in helping out, just join #opennms on irc.freenode.net and check out the Bug Day page for a few pointers on getting started.
You don’t have to be a coder, you could help with documentation, help other folks install OpenNMS, or verify bugs still exist, or that they’re fixed as they’re fixed.
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By RangerRick, on January 26th, 2008%
I’ve submitted some patches to D-Bus to allow it to auto-launch on Mac OS X. This should let me remove some completely awful and distribution-specific code from kdelibs.
It’s got a few quirks to work out, but on 10.5, it’s rockin’! Even scarier, I wrote C code. I think it might even be halfway decent C code. Time to look out, Armageddon is clearly happening any day now. 🙂
Oh, and as an aside, this is the first time I’ve actually had to break down and finally learn how to use Git, since that’s what dbus uses, and it’s friggin’ amazing. Lightning fast, and well-suited to sending patches upstream.
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By RangerRick, on January 25th, 2008%
If there’s one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it’s that they’re stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS…) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.
I got slashdotted (and ars technica’d, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.
First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I’ve been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.
As a result, the thing I’d hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen — the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin’ with . . . → Read More: Stats Junkie
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By RangerRick, on January 18th, 2008%
The future, Ranger Rick?
That’s right, dear reader. Let’s look to the future, all the way to the year 2000!“
So, in preparation for working on becoming an officially-supported part of KDE, I’m starting to move “my” project information into someplace that makes it easier to get the community’s involvement.
First, I’ve gone ahead and moved the wiki stuff to KDE techbase.
Next up is starting to offer up the torrents on ftp.kde.org, but I need to get access to it again.
And hopefully soon, we can get a proper KDE mailing list set up, rather than the occasional post to kde-nonlinux.
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