One of the things you'd expect from an active open source project is that the code base is likely to grow as more and more features are added. Does a lack of growth imply that there is a functionality ceiling imposed on open core software?
A real world example of what Tarus Balog from OpenNMS has been banging on about recently with his critique of open core or fauxpen source as Tarus calls it.
A product manager who has an open product and a closed product plainly has a decision to make over which features go into which product. Give too much away and the value add of the closed enterprise product is insufficient to warrant the licence fees. Put too many features into the enterprise product and the open source offering becomes useless.
…by Grig Gheorghiu over on the Agile Testing blog: The sad state of open source monitoring tools.
I wish there was a standard nomenclature for this stuff, as well as a standard way for these tools to inter-operate. As it is, you have to learn each tool and train your brain to ignore all the weirdness that it encounters.
One of the problems with I.T. is the absence of a standard terminology. It would make things a lot easier if everybody used a standard set of terminology. Kinda hard to see how this can be imposed though. I guess over time a standard terminology will just evolve after the industry has matured a little more.
One side effect of the increased competition in open source network management is that it is becoming increasingly hard to choose which tool is right for you.
With that in mind I intend to create a comparison featuring the best known open source tools to make the process of choosing the right tool a little bit easier.
I’ll publish the comparison in tranches so that, by the end of it, a comprehensive comparison is available. The first tranches will present more general information. As the series progresses more detailed information will be presented.
Roberto Galoppini posted an interview with Mark Hinkle, the community VP over at Zenoss. Interesting…
One of the great things about sourceforge, apart from the cool services they provide free to open source projects, is that they provide statistics about the projects they host.
One of the stats that sourceforge provides is a history of project downloads. You can’t compare the stats though. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the downloads for the major open source network management projects.
The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project. Download volume isn’t a perfect measure, but it is one of the best available. I doubt even the projects themselves have an absolutely accurate idea of how many installations they have.
Google Trends is an on-line service for comparing the search volumes for up to five keywords. I thought it would be interesting to compare the relative buzz of the new wave open source network management players between themselves, but also between other open source projects and commercial products.
Google Trends doesn’t supply the search volumes themselves, so no quantitative data will be presented. The data that is presented is solely comparative. You can see, over time, which keywords are being searched for the most. Please note: you cannot infer any intent from the search volume. The searchers may be looking for general product information, installation notes or just about anything else. I have assumed that the search patterns are the same between the various projects/products.
