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One of the first special reports I wrote for 451 Group was an analysis of the open source systems management vendors on the scene — GroundWork, Hyperic, Zenoss, OpenNMS Group, Nagios Enterprises and some others. These named ones are those that made it and while there was some reckoning in the market and there have been changes, it is interesting to see these players still plugging away, pushing into new markets and powering open source for systems, network and application monitoring and management, including cloud computing environments.

When acquired by SpringSource a year ago, there was some question as to the real value of open source systems monitoring and management company Hyperic, which had taken the most pronounced and aggressive move toward the cloud. Flash forward to VMware’s latest SpringSource tc Server release and we see VMware, at the very least, still sees technical and market value in Hyperic, which continues to be its cloud appliation and infrastructure monitoring technology and brand. Hyperic and its acquisition by SpringSource also served as an early milestone in the devops trend.

As for GroundWork Open Source, the company just made an announcement for monitoring private clouds created with Eucalyptus Systems, which continues to gain buzz and attention itself with its recent hiring of former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos. The GroundWork-Eucalyptus joint offering, intended to provide one point of control for datacenters and cloud computing environments both private and public, is also intended for channel partners (which represent about half of GroundWork’s revenue) to offer Eucalyptus-based private clouds with monitoring as well.

Zenoss is another vendor that continues to leverage open source for systems management that is finding continued interest and traction in large part thanks to emergent models and strategies in cloud computing. In its case, Zenoss announced it will provide service assurance monitoring for private and public clouds based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System. The beta service promises enterprises and service providers fast and cost effective deployment of a unified operations console for UCS services, which could include physical, virtual and/or cloud computing environments.

There are also others that are still growing in the enterprise systems monitoring and management space with open source software: Nagios Enterprises and OpenNMS Group in particular. Nagios Enterprises, which shares the same name as the popular open source monitoring project, continues to grow its enterprise and cloud presence despite a fork and check on its development last year.

OpenNMS Group, among the most community and project-oriented of the open source commercial plays in systems management, is part of an interesting effort toward a cloud service broker (CSB), aimed at enabling service providers to connect to various cloud providers, along with British Telecom and others.

Given much of the efficiency and rewards of cloud computing center on driving greater utilization and efficiency, it is not surprising that monitoring is a big part of it. Given the trend toward using open source pieces for cloud computing, particularly as we consider the current wave of investment and building of private cloud infrastructures where open source is very well-suited, it is not surprising to see open source a big part of it, too.

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There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.”

It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially since, as Stephen O’Grady noted it is directly contradicted by Gartner’s prediction that: “By 2012, at least 70% of the revenue from commercial OSS will come from vendor-centric projects with dual-license business models.”

Success?

I remember reading this prediction back in December but dismissing it as being based on a fundamental error – the assumption that dual licensing and open source licensing are “essentially the same thing”. As Stephen argues, and we have previously clarified, they are not the same thing at all.

Dual licensing is the practice of selling exceptions to use an open source code base using a commercial license, while open core licensing is the practice of selling extensions to an open source code base. One of them is considered acceptable by Richard Stallman, and one isn’t (more on that in a minute).

As Stephen O’Grady notes, however, the Gartner prediction is further flawed. Even if we were to accept its definition of dual licensing, the prediction is undermined by mathematics. A couple of quick calculations suggest that Red Hat’s annual revenue this year will be easily be more than the rest of the top ten open source specialists combined.

Of course, this calculation very much depends on which vendors you choose to include, and it is quite possible that Gartner’s definition of dual licensing also includes vendors that sell proprietary software that includes or complements open source software. That would make the prediction more realistic in terms of revenue numbers, but would stretch the term “dual licensing” beyond the definition of most people.

It is safe to assume then that “dual licensing” as most people understand it is not going to be as successful as Gartner predicts. But what of Brian Aker’s prediction of its imminent failure? It probably goes without saying that reports of its demise have also been exaggerated.

Failure?

While it is undeniably true that dual licensing has diminished in popularity as a business strategy in recent years (as many commercial OSS specialists have opted for open core extensions as a quicker way to monetize community adoption and proprietary vendors have focused more on open source as a R&D cost-sharing exercise and avoided the community-limiting aspects of dual licensing) there is still a time and a place for dual licensing.

Dual licensing has got itself a bad name in some quarters (“MySQL != Free Software due to dual licensing“) but as mentioned above, it has the approval of Free Software Foundation president, Richard Stallman: “I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed.”

In fact, much of the criticism of dual licensing seen recently seems to be based on the view that it is used by commercial vendors to discourage users from adopting a free open source version. That is rarely, if ever, the case.

Where we do see dual licensing used, it is more often in enabling users that are unwilling or unable to use the GNU GPL to make use of the underlying code. In that way, dual licensing can be used to serve two different user groups, rather than attempting to cross- or up-sell open source users with a commercial version.

A good example of this is OpenNMS Group. The acquisition of copyright to the 1.0 code base in 2009 out the company in the position of being able to changing its licensing strategy beyong a pure open source approach. While the company is unlikely to go open core (Tarus Balog prefers to call it “fauxpen source”, OpenNMS has delivered Powered by OpenNMS – a commercial license program:

“While the OpenNMS Group encourages the adoption of open source software, some organizations, due to trade secrets, patents or other proprietary reasons, may not be able to use 100% open source software in their environment. The ‘Powered by OpenNMS’ program allows them to purchase the right to use OpenNMS under a more traditional license.”

That in itself does not guarantee the continued use of dual licensing. But it does demonstrate. along with the comments of Richard Stallman, that dual licensing remains a valid strategy for generating revenue from open source software that is compatible with the principles of free and open source software.

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In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Mini Conferences

On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold mini-conferences and the SCaLE staff has been excellent at helping to organize and promote the events. I conducted a  Zenoss Community Day that Friday with phenomenal attendance and enjoyed meeting a great group of open source management users. I also peeked in on Ubucon which had a standing room only crowd of Ubuntu users. There were also quite a few other special events that seemed to be well attended.

The Keynotes

I got to watch both keynotes this year and they were both excellent. Here’s a little recap.

Karsten Wade’s – Being a Catalyst in Communities – The scientific facts about the open source way

Karsten’s a bona fide community builder helping drive the growth of the Fedora project, an open source distribution sponsored by Red Hat. His talk was a great overview of how to drive community participation and better yet, what results not to discount. He also announced the newly published free book, The Open Source Way – Creating and nurturing communities of contributors. A blue print of how to apply open source principles to communities and facilitate participation. In his presentation he made reference to an initiative sponsored by Red Hat,  Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), to help professors understand how to get their students involved in open source which was very cool.

He also made some interesting references to research done by Etienne Wenger on Communities of  Practice, which are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Which is part of the science indicated in the time of the talk.

Tarus Balog’s – So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business

Tarus is the lead of the OpenNMS project which he maintains in conjunction with a services business, The OpenNMS Group. He offers a very candid tale of his starting the OpenNMS group using the board game, Life, as a metaphor. It was very clever. Tarus and I share a common interest in open source IT management given the companies and projects with but we have some different philosophical views on how to develop those companies and communities. Despite that I really respect his passion for his project and his company. I thought his presentation was very well done and really enjoyed his talk.

Both keynotes are available here on UStream.

Sessions

I got to sit in on Stephen Spector’s presentation on Xen and had a lot of time to talk to him through out the show. Xen fascinates me as a open source virtualization technology it’s used everywhere and even serves as the infrastructure for Amazon EC2.

I was there to man the Zenoss booth so I missed out on a couple of scaling and cloud presentations but the word was they were all great:

• Ari Lerner’s presentation on Pool Party. Written in ruby, PoolParty provides a nice domain specific language for describing a repeatable, declarative cloud computing infrastructure. Mainly focusing on amazon’s EC2 offering, the presentation will cover basic concepts of cloud computing, how PoolParty works and how you can get into the clouds in one command
• Scaling Facebook via Open Source – Given their use of  of the following open source projects in highly available deployments I thought this would be interesting: Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Scribe, and Thrift.

If you are an open source fan or vendor and can make the trip, I highly recommend attending to SCale 9x next February.

Related Articles

• SCaLE 8x Report – (linuxjournal.com)
• Improving the FLOSS legal landscape (iquaid.org)
• SCALE8X Day 2. Ubuntu Kernel Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)
• SCALE8X Final Day Ubuntu Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)

Technorati Tags: Fedora, LInuxfest, Los Angeles, Open Source, OpenNMS, SCALE8x, Xen

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I’m really proud to announce the release of the version 1.0 of mysql-snmp.

What is mysql-snmp?

mysql-snmp is a mix between the excellent MySQL Cacti Templates and a Net-SNMP agent. The idea is that combining the power of the MySQL Cacti Templates and any SNMP based monitoring would unleash a powerful mysql monitoring system. Of course this project favorite monitoring system is OpenNMS.

mysql-snmp is shipped with the necessary OpenNMS configuration files, but any other SNMP monitoring software can be used (provided you configure it).

To get there, you need to run a SNMP agent on each MySQL server, along with mysql-snmp. Then OpenNMS (or any SNMP monitoring software) will contact it and fetch the various values.

Mysql-snmp exposes a lot of useful values including but not limited to:

• SHOW STATUS values
• SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS parsed values (MySQL 5.0, 5.1, XtraDB or Innodb plugin are supported)

Here are some graph examples produced with OpenNMS 1.6.5 and mysql-snmp 1.0 on one of Days of Wonder MySQL server (running a MySQL 5.0 Percona build):

Where to get it

mysql-snmp is available in my github repository. The repository contains a spec file to build a RPM and what is needed to build a Debian package. Refer to the README or the mysql-snmp page for more information.

Thanks to gihub, it is possible to download the tarball instead of using Git:

Mysql-snmp v1.0 tarball

Changelog

This lists all new features/options from the initial version v0.6:

• Spec file to build RPM
• Use of configuration file for storing mysql password
• Fix of slave handling
• Fix for mk-heartbeat slave lag
• Support of InnoDB plugin and Percona XtraDB
• Automated testing of InnoDB parsing
• Removed some false positive errors
• OpenNMS configuration generation from MySQL Cacti Templates core files
• 64 bits computation done in Perl instead of (ab)using MySQL
• More InnoDB values (memory, locked tables, …)

Reporting Issues

Please use Github issue system to report any issues.

Requirements

There is a little issue here. mysql-snmp uses Net-Snmp. Not all versions of Net-Snmp are supported as some older versions have some bug for dealing with Counter64. Version 5.4.2.1 with this patch is known to work fine.

Also note that this project uses some Counter64, so make sure you configure your SNMP monitoring software to use SNMP v2c or v3 (SNMP v1 doesn’t support 64 bits values).

Final words!

I wish everybody an happy new year. Consider this new version as my Christmas present to the community

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