Open Management Consortium Blog

Your help needed: Who is the best candidate for the open source community?

whurley — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:57:20 GMT

Hey Everyone,

I have a question for you the group:

<h5>Have any of the 2008 candidates ever even heard the words 'open' and 'source' used together in a sentence?</h5>

My guess is probably not, which is sad. Think about the current issues around patent reform. Does open source play a role? If so, shouldn't the candidates have some basic knowledge of open source?

It's with that in mind that I put together a little survey on my blog. Now this isn't a scheme to drive traffic. I really want to know what people think. So, I'm writing you to provide you with both the link to the poll, as well as the code to embed the poll on your own site if you'd like:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/who-is-best-for-open-source-in-20 08

<b><i>Again, the goal here is to get as many people's opinion as possible</b></i>. Please feel free to not only add the poll to your site but to help get other key influential bloggers in the open source world to do the same (your list is probably better than mine). In fact, <b>write your own blog about this</b> (you don't even have to reference mine). As long as we all use the same poll we can easily share the results (and not fragment things) with everyone. In a perfect world I'd love to see 100k+ people share their opinion over the next week. That will take each of us working together to get this poll on as many websites as possible.

I'd also welcome any comments (pro or con about this) either via email, or preferably on <a href="http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/who-is-best-for-open-source-in-20 08">my blog and out in the open where everyone can participate in the discussion</a>.

Let me know what you think,

whurley

Introducing the OMC Open Agent Project

whurley — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:06:04 GMT

Today at <a href="barcampesm.org">BarCampESM</a> Erik Dahl led as discussion on "The need for an open agent". After this discussion tlockney and I announced the GA of the new Open Management Consortium website, and via a "show of hands" consensus, set up a new sub=project in the monitoring community for the "OMC Open Agent" project. Erik will be leading the effort and building out the community over the next weeks. Please join in and help him out. Now, go visit the new <a href="http://openmanagement.org/community/monitoring/omc_open_agent">OMC Open Agent community</a> to learn more about this exciting project.

Introducing design patterns for systems management

whurley — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:20:44 GMT

Moments ago ahonor opened a discussion entitled Design patterns for software operations? which caught our eye. Here's specifically what cuaght my eye:

Those of you that develop software (or have in their past) are probably used to the idea of using or referring to design patterns when implementing software. One of the things great about design patterns is that they explain the problem space, analyze it and describe generic solutions that can be implemented in your application language and/or runtime of choice (ie, they are technology agnostic). It especially helps avoid re-inventing solutions.

Working in various software operations groups over the years it eventually seemed obvious to me that there were nascent design patterns that could be applied generally and be a source of useful knowledge. You can read more about my reasoning at the dev2ops blog: http://dev2ops.blogspot.com/2008/01/where-are-design-patterns-for-software.html

In addition to linking to his original blog post ahonor suggested that we start a workgroup within the OMC:

To get the idea off the ground, I would like to propose using the wiki and forums facilities of the Open Management Consortium website. We could fit the discussion under an existing group like "Open Standards" or create a new community group like "Design Patterns". The wiki plays the role of catalog and repository while the forums can be useful for hammering out ideas.

The process of starting a repository of patterns should initially be informal to encourage participation. As time goes on and as the number of proposals increases, we can determine a means to catalog and measure consensus.

I am volunteering to get things started and drive the effort. I think we would all benefit from having a resource like this and it can only help improve consistency and even interoperability!

Well, as you all know this is exactly how we want the OMC to operate; community lead. So we have created a new workspace under the "Open Standards" section of the website called "OMC Design Patterns". Thanks to ahonor for the idea and for volunteering to kick things off and help manage the workspace. You can link directly to the workspace (from your blog or other sites) using the following URL:

http://beta.openmanagement.org/community/open_standards/omc_design_patterns

It will be very interesting to see how much adoption this idea picks up. I for one will be participating heavily in the workspace as ahonor has a great idea/perspective that I hope others join in support of.