The Packet Scoop

Today we released our position paper on our thoughts about open source software, how PacketTrap integrates with open source projects, and why we believe the hybrid open source commercial companies are going to fail. Yep, you heard it here first – especially in network management. We recently learned that Groundwork Open was laying off people, and it won’t be surprising to see others follow. Building a commercial company dependant on a volunteer community is tough to say the least. Of course RedHat developed their own flavor of Linux, but they did it by leveraging an existing enormous community of developers who were at their wits end with Microsoft. In their case the peasants (the developer community) were coming over the hills with pitch forks ready to attack Microsoft, and the smart people at RedHat were able to leverage the movement. Good for RedHat. There’s no such movement in network management. There’s no such anger. Nagios developers aren’t angry at commercial network management vendors like Linus Torvalds and his minions are at Microsoft. After all, Redmond’s a legal monopoly.

But let’s look at the successes of hybrid open source companies. Oops. I just listed them all. RedHat is one. Are there others? Nope. Perhaps MySQL is another, but lets put MySQL in perspective. MySQL had the same momentum as RedHat, but the irony is that the good people at MySQL saw the light and sold out to commercial database giant Sun last week for $1 billion. They made the right choice. MySQL has over 10 MM downloads but top line growth had slowed. Quarter over quarter growth was stagnant. This is because the real users of MySQL are a collection of smaller companies and one-off developers implementing websites with relatively trivial back ends. These smaller implementations don’t need the more robust commercial version because they’re not distributing their applications via software download or an appliance. Hence, no revenue to MySQL. The growth wasn’t there anymore so they took a good deal from Sun.

So, there are really no successful hybrid open source companies. That’s because the interest of a commercial vendor is opposite to that of an open source project. Commercial vendors answer to roadmaps, salespeople, and shareholders. They need to pump out features and get more revenue. Open source projects are dedicated to peer review, quality, and more quality. Feature delivery on a timeline is not high on the priority list.

At PacketTrap we are huge fans of open source software and the community of volunteers who dedicate themselves to their projects. We believe, however, that commercial vendors like us should integrate open source solutions, but not tamper with open source communities. That is, we integrate MRTG, Nagios, and any other open source browser-based solution. In fact, everything we do has an eye towards open source integration. We lead the commercial industry in embracing the open source community without tampering with it like the hybrid companies do. The commercial model works, however it needs to evolve to ensure that open source software can be easily integrated. We intend to do that.

In the meantime, check out our open source position paper.

Networks are complicated. Network management tools and network management software doesn’t have to be.

Steve