agreed. Standards can be a good driver for openness. Though it's not always clear what standard to follow. I remember talking about the rising web services standards and its impact on IT management about 7 years ago. I had predicted that with standard web services APIs, we were going to see less and less bespoke integrations. Needless to say, I was proven wrong (at least so far). We're still spending majority of our time in implementations, integrating this product with the other etc. Standards support is scarce.

@Alex, all I can say is I feel your pain <img class="jive-emoticon" border="0" src="http://beta.openmanagement.org/images/emoticons/happy.gif" alt=":)" /> This is something that almost all shared infrastructure providers (internal or external) that I work with suffer from. Point to point integrations (typically provided by vendors) are typically weak and APIs are either not available or easily accessible making life difficult for 3rd party solutions.<br />

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I'd like to hear more about what you mean by "unix toolbox philosophy" at some point!

Allright, we have the discussion going now. I'll start with my background to give some context to my comments, because I often feel the blind elephant http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3 syndrome in discussions.

My experience has been mostly in the monitoring and event management (or in ITIL terms config mgmt,change mgmt,incident mgmt,problem mgmt and service desk) in the larger organizations, service providers, large financial corporations etc. I believe the requirements and dynamics in very large organizations is very different than the SMBs so it's important to note where one is coming from.

@Damon, first, I share your concerns about the standards. Especially if you mean standards that are established by regulatory agencies, but it does not have to be that way. "Standards" also can be driven by companies open source or otherwise organically. In the web environment SOAP vs REST discussions can be an example. Many people did not like the SOAP standard and REST like web services "emerged". It is not a written standard but yet is established. REST like web interfaces, RSS, ATOM can be used for integration on the web easily. This has not happened in IT management field and we're paying a steep price for it. Sending an SNMP trap is still the only established (commonly used) method to send information from one application to the other, and that just does not do folks. There is no standard/accepted method for the applications to exchange data and integrate with one another, open source or otherwise (in the IT management field). I'd love to give credit to open source project for doing this better, but that is just not the case. In fact, I believe OMC was originally founded to address this very problem. AFAIK, there has not been much progress. So I don't see open source offering a solution to this problem, at least not so far.

I like the "social contract" description. Not sure I agree that the social contract is worthless if not backed up by legal mechanism though. Community perception and brainshare can also be quite powerful motivators, if the community was to demand and value such a contract.

I do disagree however that having an open source license alone makes a company "open". I do agree that this is the current perception; one that I believe to be false. Availability of the source code, and the fact that I can fork it if I wanted to is not much of a comfort. Most of us are not developers, a script here and there is fine but we can't fork a project and make it open nor do we want to. We just want to use them. This may be the fundamental difference between open source projects that target developers and open source IT management tools. From what I see, open source works much better when the target audience of the product is developers. The relationship is problematic for open source IT management projects. This is perhaps why most open source IT management tools projects are driven by commercial companies rather than the community. Most users of IT management tools are not developers. We can contribute in some ways but we can develop the product itself. People who have both IT management and software development skills are a rare breed. Precious people

I also don't think that there are open source solutions for the problems we face in large organizations. I am most familiar with the network monitoring field, which happen to have a lot of open source tools, yet they are nowhere near meeting the requirements of large environments. SNMP polling a device and reporting it down just does not cut it. There are very hard problems to solve; problems proprietary vendors are also struggling to solve, nonetheless they are ahead. I know I'll get grief for this paragraph but this is what I see based on my limited view of the world (refer to the first paragraph on where my experience lies).

In short, I feel we must promote and demand "open management" from all vendors proprietary or open source, and try to define what we mean by open as best we can. I believe this is a more realistic approach then demanding/hoping that large IT management vendor to open source all their products. That's just very unlikely to happen. We can get much better traction if we as the community demand more "openness" with concrete criteria. I think whurley's progress in BMC http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/yes-were-open is indicative of this.

Boy, why do I feel like I'm going to regret pushing the Add button

Agreed! Well said. Many promises and initiatives have long been forgotten, so much that no one believes the vendors anymore, no? We've all turned into skeptics and rightly so.

To add to this, I also don't think the community/customers do not demand this strongly enough from the vendors. While working for a vendor I was surprised how shallow the inquiries related to integration were. Most often we just got asked "do you have an integration (adapter) with X?" or "do you have an API?" not much more went to it, so it is easy enough for the vendors to say they are "open".

This may be due to the fact that customers don't have the established criteria, vocabulary to ask the right questions. I may be wrong. "Open source" is one such criterion that is easy to ask so it has at least that advantage, but I think we need more granular definitions. As I work on integrations a lot, I had attempted to identify some seed questions to evaluate integrations in a blog post (http://www.ifountain.com/blog/Top8questionstoaskwhenevaluatingintegrationsolutions) I'm sure we can do much better than that collectively.

We should be able to more questions that will allow us to gauge the openness of the products, and better yet, should do this out in the public (domain rather than sales meetings) so that everyone can see the answers and scrutinize them. We need this conversation of openness to happen in the public domain (hence the need to do away with NDAs) to create awareness. If there is sufficient demand from potential customers, vendors would respond, otherwise it will not go anywhere (even if some people in the vendor organizations also push it, they also need backup.)