I don't do the books, so I don't know the revenue numbers, but I know we're profitable, and so far profit is always turned around into more growth -- generally developers or support.

As for our prices, we don't charge for software licenses at all, so we're infinitely less expensive than the big guys in that regard. ;)

When it comes to support, ours is insanely cheap compared to HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, or any of the other big players we compete with, especially when you scale up. Of course, you can't comparison shop because HP and IBM and their like hide their (per-node) licensing and support prices behind channel partners and "have a salesperson call you," generally billing small customers with no clout a multiple per license what they charge for large customers for "volume discounts," despite the fact that it doesn't matter to the software itself how many nodes there are.

If you don't need support, OpenNMS is free, and always will be. Many people don't need it; there's a healthy community who can help. But the people who work for the .com side of things have been in network management for years, and if you want help on how to solve a particular monitoring problem, or want someone to call for help if something goes wrong, that's how we continue to be able to pay people full-time to make OpenNMS better.

Jinx!

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the OpenNMS developers.)

Depends on what you do in your enterprise. OpenNMS does a lot of useful stuff out of the box, but is a platform first, and an application second. OpenNMS's biggest strength is the breadth of ways to integrate it with other tools, and huge scalability (we have installations collecting millions of data points every 5 minutes, and monitoring devices with 50k interfaces each without breaking a sweat, replacing failing OpenView installations in large telcos). New features are new features, and we're pretty conservative in the scope of features that get put into the even (stable) releases. If you're running unstable, well, they're new features, and sometimes there are bugs... All a part of developing in the fish bowl.

And you don't need an account manager at the other end to yell at when you can get immediate support from someone with intimate knowledge of the system, that's how we've survived as a company while remaining true to being 100% open source software. No BS, just support which is all "level 3." Not that we typically have things that just cease to function without provocation, but without a bug report it's hard to answer that particular comment. ;)

The commercial implications of the GPL actually resemble a drunken menage a trois between thought experiment, a Rube Goldberg machine, and Pulp Fiction's explanation of Amsterdam's marijuana laws.

In your haste to sell out, you also removed my copyrighted material that I posted myself. Thanks for "helping" an aspiring independent artist like me!