Want to see LibreNMS continue to grow? So do we which is why we’ve taken the deciscion to change things up a little. Looking after a project like LibreNMS which is used all the way from home labs through to some large global companies is a time consuming job and for the last 4+ years this has been done by people volunteering their own time. Without people like yourself and the core contributors / maintainers this project would have fizzled out a long time ago.
So how do we ensure we keep things moving along? After a lot of discussions between all the core maintainers, we’ve decided that one way to be able to do that is to introduce a subscription based service. Naturally we will continue to release an open source version every 3 months with all the features you would get in the subscription version with the exception of alerting and distributed polling. We’re still in the process of organising a payment processor, as soon as that has been setup then we will start advertising www.librenms.com which will be the commercial side of LibreNMS going forward.
We’ve decided that a nominal yearly cost of $150 would be the most appropriate amount to charge which will also include support available only via a Slack channel. Invites to join will be sent once a subscription has been purchased. Higher levels of subscriptions may also be introduced at some stage once things have settled down and we’ve had chance to get some feedback.
As always we’re happy to receive feedback, if you want to get in touch to discuss this then please email [email protected]
If you want to know more about the new subscription service then you can head here: https://t.libren.ms/subscription
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So as April the 1st is nearing a close in the UK and that everyone has most likely realised that this is in fact an April fool I thought I’d follow up this post.
Someone on twitter has already tried to call me out on this that it was done in bad taste, well they couldn’t be more wrong in my opinion. This was done as a joke, plain and simple. However when I started writing it did highlight a few things to me which I felt should be talked about more than the joke itself - this response was coming regardless of the comment on twitter.
Like many open source projects, LibreNMS survive purely by the hands of a few. Those few have changed over time which is understandable and expected as life changes for people and priorities shift. We are lucky to have a few core maintainers who’ve been around for a while and also one or two who have stuck around to lend a serious helping hand to other users. Yes we have 450+ contributors listed in GitHub, some with nothing more than a documentation fix (which is hugely appreciated by the way) but this volume by itself doesn’t keep a project going.
What does keep a project going is the unbelievable sacrifice made by the core maintainers. The thought that LibreNMS can only survive by charging money is daft in itself but not totally crazy hence why I started writing this post in the first place. Let me assure you though, LibreNMS will always be Open source and none of the core maintainers will support releasing a paid for subscription service. Everyone who downloads the software is entitled to all of the hard work that everyone puts in and that will continue to be the case.
Could LibreNMS be something more if we charged people for it, absolutely but that’s still not going to happen. We have discussed internally the option of having a full time developer on board which we’d all love to see as it would mean the code base would develop quicker with more features which is in a small way, one reason why we started using Open collective (https://opencollective.com/librenms). We haven’t pushed this avenue much but it does fall in line with what most other open source projects see and that’s people typically don’t donate financially. That makes it tough to make any sort of future plans with regards to having someone working on the project full time but as people say, never say never.
I’ve made a post on here before about interacting with open source projects which was designed to be a generic way to engage with projects but written from the stance of my involvement with LibreNMS. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth 5 minutes of your time (Interacting with Opensource projects). So let me just finish off and re-iterate, everyones time here is not free but it’s donated to the project so others can benefit. Please be mindful and respectful of that when asking for help or new features. We do what we can when we can with the projects best interests at heart because we really do care that you’ve picked LibreNMS - at the end of the day, you have lots of choice out there.
So happy monitoring and thanks for anything and everything you made do for this project.
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