The San Francisco, California-based company’s Open Source Council brings together lead developers from a number of best of breed infrastructure and network monitoring projects to help provide guidance for GroundWork’s product roadmap.
While the arrangement is something of a loose coupling at this stage, GroundWork VP of marketing, Tony Barbagallo, said the company might also look to hire or sponsor some of the key developers in the future.
From our intent, it would be an ideal world if we could have all the expertise behind these projects as employees of GroundWork, he said. But not everybody wants to get married.
In the meantime, the Open Source Council will see GroundWork benefiting from the integration expertise of some of the open source management and monitoring project lead developers, as well as formalizing level three customer support agreements.
The projects involved include the MRTG network SNMP collector, RRDtool report generation tool and SmokePing latency measurement tool, all led by Tobi Oetiker, as well as NeDi for network discovery and configuration (Remo Rickli), and Cacti discovery tool (Ian Berry).
Three other projects are involved at this stage: the Ganglia cluster monitoring project led by Matt Massie, the Dojo JavaScript toolkit (Alex Russell) and the Sendpage paging system (Kees Cook).
Most of these projects are already including with the GroundWork Monitor software, although NeDi, Cacti and Ganglia are supported by ad hoc support arrangements. One of the roles of the Open Source Council will be to help GroundWork to understand when these and other projects should be brought into the fold, Barbagallo said.
As well as sharing support opportunities, GroundWork has and will provide code contributions to the projects based on its own experiences, Barbagallo said, although the projects will be free to accept or decline them.
Looking ahead the company might look to sponsor or hire some of the key developers, Barbagallo added, following a model that worked well for open source Java middleware vendor JBoss as it built out its suite by hiring key developers as it added their projects to its support portfolio.
The formation of GroundWork’s Open Source Council is the second grouping of open source systems management projects in recent months after the formation of the Open Management Consortium by Qlusters, Emu Software, Zenoss, Symbiot, the Webmin project, and Ayamon in May.
Barbagallo maintained that the two groups are complementary rather than competitive and dismissed suggestions of a split in the nascent open source management market. We were invited to join the OMC and we’re still looking at that, he said. I look at the OMC as a standards body.
The OMC was formed to create awareness of open source systems management, and create standards that enable interoperability and integration, and Barbagallo said GroundWork had not ruled out joining in the future.
It may work very well, it may not. We are a small company and this was a bigger priority for us. If we were a little larger and had more resources, we’d join in a heartbeat, he said.
