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."

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.

Depends upon your definition of success

[laing]

All of those projects have code in them that solves specific problems. The 'dead' projects are still a valuable resource for anyone who is developing GPL code since they can freely use the 'dead' code in their project.

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: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.

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 [opennms.org] 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?