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!
Share on Facebook
By RangerRick, on March 4th, 2008
My former employer, Motricity, finally officially announced laying off a boatload of people this morning.
I've weighed in quite a bit on Motricity and their baffling business strategies on the MocoNews post that talked about rumors of layoffs; going by what most of us former employees have said, this has been expected for a looooooong time.
Best wishes go out to all of those affected by layoffs; I still know a few folks who have stuck around this long; they should be at least expecting a nice severance package and some time to look for something new. I worked with plenty of very talented people there who I expect will be able to get back on their feet pretty quick.
Good luck to all!
Share on Facebook
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 likely *have* made modifications, 'cause that code has plenty of bugs that have been fixed in later OpenNMS releases. 😉
One thing that Tarus didn't really mention is that we (The OpenNMS Group) have had a few folks come to us wanting quotes to compare us to Cittio, and they've been rather surprised that Cittio is in fact already using OpenNMS under the covers. The problem is not with them using OpenNMS, OpenNMS is all about sticking not only to the letter but also the spirit of the GPL, and they can do whatever they want with it as long as they're complying with the distribution requirements of the license. The problem is whether Cittio *is* upholding their side of the GPL, and it's unclear whether they are -- and there are some signs that they might not be.
As for them not having to offer the source until they distribute the software, yes, that's true, but from what we've heard from existing Cittio customers, that is not being made clear to them. Not only that, but while the wording of the GPL may not make it obvious, the FAQ does:
The difference between this and "incorporating" the GPL-covered software is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The substantive part is this: if the two programs are combined so that they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can't treat them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole thing.
If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs--but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection.
It seems likely that they've incorporated OpenNMS into their software at a lower-level than just screen-scraping it's output and stuffing it into their own UI. At that point, they should be prepared to provide the modified OpenNMS source to their customers. Not only that, but considering how tough companies are on open-source developers accidentally "tainting" open-source code with IP from their closed-source employers, it's more than a tad annoying that many closed-source companies taking advantage of open-source software are happy to use it, but ignore the spirit of sharing that is part of being in the community. "We won't say anything, but if you do ask us for the source, we'll fax it to you." 😉
Again, all this is unproven, and they've not been terribly responsive to private inquiries on the matter, and that's part of the reason Tarus posted, the question is -- what's the next step?
Update: Tarus also weighed in on the slashdot stuff here.
Share on Facebook
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.
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 written pretty much entirely by the Oculan engineering team, that's amazing. People didn't just decide to use OpenNMS, they bothered to learn their way around a huge codebase to the point that they could make a significant contribution to the project. For that matter, The OpenNMS Group has enough interest to run regular training sessions, so it's clear we've got people dedicated to using OpenNMS for the long haul. Not to mention, the list of major features added since 1.2 is quite staggering. That wouldn't be possible without people from the community getting involved, fixing bugs, submitting code, and all-around being a part of the project.
The best part is, we're just getting started. Now that OpenNMS has simple installation on most platforms, the barrier is much lower for "release early, release often," and we have a much better process for making sure that it isn't 3 years until the next stable release.
We're working on the last few bugs which block an OpenNMS 1.6 release candidate. Why 1.6? Because so much has changed since 1.2 that calling it 1.4 would be doing it a disservice. I can't wait to announce the 1.6 release candidate and show all the great stuff people have made over the last 3 years, and I look forward to seeing the community grow even more in the coming years. Thanks to everyone so far that's been a part of making that possible.
Share on Facebook
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.
Share on Facebook
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)
Share on Facebook
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.
Share on Facebook
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.
Share on Facebook
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 people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!
Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.
We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. 😉
I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!
And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."
I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."
All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.
Share on Facebook
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.
Share on Facebook
|
|
|
