Dear Mark, dear Canonical's Employees.

I'm glad to see the Landscape project at Canonical, I think it's a real answer to a real need: all actors in this category are just not usable or coming from another age (Openview ...), except opensource project: cacti & nagios which are not perfect but really usefull.

The power of Cacti and Nagios in this particular market, is simply that disponibility of the source code, have made this projects multiplateform and malleable to answer our needs.

I'm a huge supporter of Ubuntu, and have a lot of places in our architecture, where ubuntu simply do the trick, but I'm also using a lot of Solaris and some *BSD.
My concerns here are that Canonical lost his mind, Landscape will not be an open source project !

This project will simply failed:

  • no adoption from the community = no sysadmin will recommend to use that product
  • your customers/users will never adopt it, they want the support for sure, but they also want the code, they come at 100% from the Linux way of thinking, it's just not about money, it's just to have a tool which meets our needs.
  • Who will write support for others oses ?
  • Who will test it on other plateforms ?
  • Who will write an agent for my particular mail plateform ex software.com, my old Sybase DB, or my new XYZ software ?

All this companies failed because they just can't support everything, so at the end all this monitoring software are monitoring ... nothing.

Sun (one of your partner) is releasing everything under opensourced licenses, (Java, Solaris) but everything is really everything: they also have for example opened their authentication manager (AM), why ? Simply for the community to embrass the technology and the community have made OpenID for AM...

It's just amazing in 2007 and for a company based on open source software, to think closed.

Cheers.