OpenNMS Celebrates 10 Years 37
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."
Re:i had no idea my GNU tools were so rinkadink (Score:3, Informative)
You don't have to be successful to survive.
I have a few "projects" out on Mathwork's site. [mathworks.com] 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.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
(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. ;)
10 years on Sourceforge (Score:3, Informative)
It was around a few years before it moved to Sourceforge. If memory serves correct, at least 1998, if not older.
Re:Well.. (Score:1, Informative)
It doesn't suck :-)