Starting in 2009 popular, autonomic configuration management tool, Cfengine will be commercially supported by a company formed by Cfengine author, Mark Burgess. Cfengine has a laundry list of brand names that are using their software –AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Nokia, and many more. I suspect that many of them would pay for commercial support:

Here’s the news from the newly formed Cfengine AS:

Following 5 years of research and development under the technical direction of its long time author Mark Burgess (a professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College), the recently formed support company Cfengine AS today released a major upgrade of the Open Source, self-repairing software cfengine based on its innovative Promise Theory technology.

Unlike would-be alternatives, cfengine is not about producing alarms and reports to notify about errors and misalignments in the Data Center: it is a fully self-repairing maintenance engine capable of fixing them without human intervention. Cfengine users know that systems are compliant and maintained even when humans are unavailable, because they have made all the important decisions in advance.

Cfengine is open-source (GPL) software for configuring, monitoring and autonomically maintaining computers. It’s been around for over 15 years and is pretty prevalent among Unix administrators with a lot of machines to manage.  The concept around CFengine involves having a centralized configuration that can propagate out to servers a common use would be to develop a template or set of templates that can be used to “build” a server.

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Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Configuration Management, JeOS, Open Source, Puppet, Red Hat, Reductive Labs, Systems Management, Thin Crust, Ubuntu

As I mentioned before I really like Trent Reznor not only his music but his philosophy on making music. He’s cut out the record labels makes his music available for free. He does make money by selling tickets to shows and albums he produces himself.

I got this note from him this week (actually everyone who registered at NIN.com probably did) asking what you want from NIN – nice touch an artist doing market research. Actually the survey was way too long but he gets points for asking things like, your favorite song, your entertainment preferences, etc. so he can do his job better.

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Technorati Tags: NIN, Open Source, Trent Reznor

This week I was happy to see this white paper by Jane Curry a certified Tivoli Consultant and Instructor. Her Open Source Management Options paper compared OpenNMS, Nagios and my favorite network monitoring software, Zenoss Core. Part of the reason I love Zenoss is that I have been involved with the project for over two years and have watched our user community grow (Also and am employed by Zenoss Inc. as their VP of Community and the paycheck helps spread the love;).

The paper is a very thorough comparison of three popular open source monitoring packages. Her analysis was very gratifying since she gave Zenoss the nod. (though to be fair, she didn’t care for OpenNMS’ Java architecture due to personal choice) Otherwise it was a pretty close call:

OpenNMS and Zenoss are both extremely competent products covering automatic discovery, availability monitoring, problem management and performance management and reporting. Zenoss has some topology mapping and has better documentation but the code feels less reliable. OpenNMS currently has a rather messy architecture around events, alarms and notifications, though this is said to be under review. I also struggle to believe that you have to recycle the whole of OpenNMS if you have changed a configuration file!

Also I want to offer my congratulations to the OpenNMS guys for getting praise on their solution they’ve worked hard and have a nice product. It’s also satisfying to see a Tivoli expert acknowledge open source solutions as an alternative to well respected solutions like Tivoli.

As a follow-on John and Coté had Jane as a guest on their podcast to discuss her findings, I highly recommend the IT Management Guys podcast for a good discussion.

Technorati Tags: management, Monitoring, Nagios, Open Source, OpenNMS, Zenoss

• tecosystems » Earth Class Mail: Still Open for Business? – Stephen’s review of Earth Class Mail a snail mail handling service. Looks intriguing.
• Amazon.com: Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code: Van Lindberg: Books – from Amazon’s description: “Clear, correct, and deep, this is a welcome addition to discussions of law and computing for anyone — even lawyers!” — Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society If you work in information technology, intellectual property is central to your job — but dealing with the complexities of the legal system can be mind-boggling.  [via Matt]
• Walking With Elephants: Taking on a new challenge -Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that the pilot program for PeerToPatent is being extended for a second year and that the areas of innovation it covers is being broadened to include e-commerce and business methods.
• Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops- Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. [via Savio]
• Compiere Appoints Chief Marketing Officer to Lead Continued Global Expansion Initiatives – Open Source ERP vendor Compiere, Inc., announced that software industry veteran, John Cingari, has joined the company as chief marketing officer.
• Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows – Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft- I am fascinated by the fact that Deki is open source, is written in C# and uses the Mono framework and now runs on Windowws. It’s truly an OSS egnima. And it’s wicked cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: Compiere, DekiWiki, Earth Class Mail, MindTouch, Open Source

• SourceForge.net: ICEcore – ICEcore collaboration software is the July 2008 SF.net project of the month.
• GNOME hires Stormy Peters as Executive Director – Open Logic’s Stormy Peters leaves OpenLogic for the GNOME Foundation interesting job.
  (Via Savio)
• SnapLogic Blog » Connecting Clouds – Integration and Cloud Computing – Mikeyp gets it right, “…cloud computing will not happen overnight – it will be a gradual transition and, current hype aside, that transition is ongoing in all of these areas.”
• tecosystems » Differentiating from Twitter: Open Source and Identi.ca – “Identi.ca is likely to make an excellent personal trainer for Twitter. More so, even, than Jaiku, Pownce and friends. Why? Because the biggest community wins.”
• Linux Today – From the Middle English Phrase “God Be With Ye” – Congratulations to my good friend Brian Proffitt for becoming the community manager for the Linux Foundation’s Developer Network.
• 451 CAOS Theory » What we talk about when we talk about community – Matt Aslett talks mulls over the definition of community.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GNOME, Identi.ca, Open Source, Twitter