[kwlug-disc] the business model for open source

[Raul Suarez]

--- On Mon, 8/3/09, john at netdirect.ca <john at netdirect.ca> wrote:

> I'll see your two anecdotes and raise you one.

Here is another one. This one is in first person.

I was in charge of implementing and initially administering an expensive infrastructure monitoring solution (Mercury SiteScope, now HP SiteScope)

The software itself has very limited capabilities to report on the configuration of monitors and alerts. 

Fortunately for me, The configuration was stored - UNIX style - in flat files so I just wrote some scripts to convert the configuration to XML and started creating XSLT templates to generate the reports I cared about e.g. What alerts this email address may receive. What monitors are associated with each alert, What monitors do not have any alerts associated. etc. So, the software for which we paid > $1md was lacking but having an open format for the configuration (text) saved me.

When HP took over they moved the configuration to a proprietary format and discontinued the text file configuration (for good technical reasons). I asked them for an export, or for an API or for a specification of the new format. all to no avail until I reached a 3rd level engineer that provided me an API which... had a bug so it was useless for associating alerts to monitors. After that, they promised they would do something about that. I'm still waiting.


Raul Suarez

Technology consultant
Software, Hardware and Practices
_________________
http://rarsa.blogspot.com/ 
An eclectic collection of random thoughts


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