“New wave” network management licences


Michael Tiemann made an interesting post titled Will the Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up. Alex Fletcher wrote an interesting follow up.

That got me thinking…how kosher are the licences used by the “new wave” open source network management companies? Have Hyperic, Groundwork and Zenoss really got the open source bug, or do they want the open source kudos without really opening up?

I did a bit of digging around, and I am pleased to say that, at least to my non-legal eye, the licences do look the real deal. All of the tools are licensed under the General Public License (GPL).

You can even download all of the projects without giving any details away too. Nice not to have a salesperson hassling you just because you want to evaluate a project.

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4 Comments

  1. Jack,

    I thought you might like to see our full list of ingredients, all licensed under the GPL or compatible license:

    http://www.zenoss.com/community/code/open-source

    That’s not to say that some day there won’t be differently licensed commercial add-ons but the idea is that anyone should be able to use a fully functional (e.g. non-crippled) free version of Zenoss Core. We actually have a full-time lawyer on our staff who spends the majority of her time trying to make sure everything we use and put into the product adheres to GPL.

    Quote | Posted June 25, 2007, 1:59 pm
  2. Good stuff, it is good to see you fully doing the open in open source :)

    Quote | Posted June 25, 2007, 3:10 pm
  3. Jack,

    GroundWork unifies community-vetted and tested Open Source IT monitoring tools into a single comprehensive solution, so there are lots of open-source licenses we operate under. They’re listed here:

    http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/pro-ipingredients.html

    Sometimes we wish there were a simpler way but it was the only way to put the best tools into a comprehensive solution, regardless of the license.

    Cheers, -Peter

    Peter Mui, Open Source Community Advocate
    GROUNDWORK Open Source, Inc.
    139 Townsend Street, Suite 100
    San Francisco, CA 94107-1946
    +1 415 992 4573 (direct)
    +1 415 947 0684 (fax)
    pmui@groundworkopensource.com

    Quote | Posted June 26, 2007, 4:41 pm
  4. Wow, there sure are a lot of components in there Peter!

    Quote | Posted June 26, 2007, 4:49 pm

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