DISQUS

It's interesting that in the early days in the life of social network there seems to be a huge land grab. Many rely on flashy graphics and a couple of A-List blogger mentions and any guys with an social application can see short term success.

However, as with any product you got to provide value for them to stay. This basic concept seems to be missed by so many new social networks.

I suspect for the social networking start-up the key is to gain users while Metcalf's driving the bus and close the funding before Eflactem drives it over the cliff.

Berkay, I think I misinterpreted this sentence :

"Despite being compared to Hyperic and Zenoss, OpenNMS is different product. IMHO, it is the only true open source “network monitoring” product available. "

After carefully rereading I see you are advocating the use case for OpenNMS as network monitoring. I guess I have a heightened sensitivity when I see the mixture of company business models and opne source software. I would contend that Zenoss Core offers a very capable network management and monitoring capability as well. Thanks for the clarification.

Berkay, while you are certainly entitled to your opinion. Last time I checked HypericHQ, Zenoss, and OpenNMS all our GPL software that adhere to the open source definition.

Let's take the companies out of the equation. I think all three products have merit and they all three have users who use them for a variety of reasons. Corporate sponsorship diluting the "purity" of an open source is just FUD. The code is there and obtainable from third parties like SF.net if the users don't like the direction of the project they can fork it.

Also I think you should delve a little deeper into this great distributed IP ownership hypothesis for some projects looking at the commits for development beyond the core teams and they are pretty limited. Read some copyright's for ALL three projects and you will see copyright notices from privately and publicly held companies.

I do think what might be interesting is to look at the forum activity and source code repositories and see what's really going in these projects. Just because companies charge for a relatively small amount of additional code and a high level of service doesn't necessarily mean that the open source offering isn't a very robust solution.