It has been 3 years and 10 days since the last OpenNMS development cycle closed and a stable version was released, and the OpenNMS landscape looked very different then.
- There had not yet been a Dev-Jam.
- The professional services company for OpenNMS had only had more than 1 employee for about a year.
- The codebase was half the size it is now.
- Most importantly, the community was really only getting started.
Tarus took a big chance going off on his own to continue the OpenNMS codebase when the now-defunct Oculan Corporation discontinued their open-source services business and continued on developing a closed-source network management appliance, and it takes a long time to gain the trust of userbase. There is plenty of open-source software out there -- but while most open-source software has users, plenty of projects never develop a real community.
OpenNMS has grown a lot in 3 years. Not only has the general userbase bloomed, but the Order of the Green Polo (the "subject matter experts" of OpenNMS) has grown to a whopping 19 people. Considering it's a codebase that (at least at the start) was written pretty much entirely by the Oculan engineering team, that's amazing. People didn't just decide to use OpenNMS, they bothered to learn their way around a huge codebase to the point that they could make a significant contribution to the project. For that matter, The OpenNMS Group has enough interest to run regular training sessions, so it's clear we've got people dedicated to using OpenNMS for the long haul. Not to mention, the list of major features added since 1.2 is quite staggering. That wouldn't be possible without people from the community getting involved, fixing bugs, submitting code, and all-around being a part of the project.
The best part is, we're just getting started. Now that OpenNMS has simple installation on most platforms, the barrier is much lower for "release early, release often," and we have a much better process for making sure that it isn't 3 years until the next stable release.
We're working on the last few bugs which block an OpenNMS 1.6 release candidate. Why 1.6? Because so much has changed since 1.2 that calling it 1.4 would be doing it a disservice. I can't wait to announce the 1.6 release candidate and show all the great stuff people have made over the last 3 years, and I look forward to seeing the community grow even more in the coming years. Thanks to everyone so far that's been a part of making that possible.
