If you have ever wondered what kind of crazy thinking goes into the decision to start an open source business (because we're all at least a little crazy, make no mistake), Tarus Balog gives an entertaining and informative look at how he started OpenNMS as an open source venture over on Opensource.com.

What struck me as interesting is Balog's ready admittance that sometimes it's not always about idealism:

"You might think that I was motivated by some sort of idealistic love of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the time, I was still running a Windows desktop. I undertook the OpenNMS project because I believed one thing: in the area of network management, open source represents the best business solution."

The start of a new series on this relatively new open source site sponsored by Red Hat, this should be a great look inside the world of open source business.

Okay, you gotta give props where props are due. Congratulations to Nagios for taking first place in their category  2009 LinuxQuestions.org Member's Choice Awards. Nagios was voted Monitoring Application of the Year by LinuxQuestions.org members, with 51.11 percent of the vote.

"This is another exciting achievement for everyone involved in Nagios and we're grateful to everyone who helps make it such a great IT monitoring solution" remarked Nagios Founder Ethan Galstad in a press release earlier this month.

Zenoss scored some high marks of its own, as part of a roundup of open source monitoring tools on TechTarget's SearchNetworking site.

"'When I first needed a network monitoring tool, I had no funding for a commercial alternative,; said David Nalley, a Unix administrator for document management solution provider KeyMark, who uses the Zenoss open source management tool.

"Zenoss, which recorded a 150% increase in revenue during 2009, counts 300 enterprise customers and more than 1 million downloads of its Zenoss Core open source project code."

Be sure to check out the review for a good look at the current state of the open source network management ecosystem.

Ruby devs, take note: there's now a Ruby library for accessing Zenoss through its REST interface available out on RubyGems.org.

It should be noted that this new library is clearly a work in progress, with new functionality being added all of the time. Still, it's a good way to get some Ruby-based hooks into the Zenoss toolset.