[HEADS UP] New project name: Monitoring Plugins

[Holger Weiß]

* L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net> [2014-01-16 15:48]:
> At 06:12 PM 1/15/2014, Holger Weiß wrote:
> >As some of you might've noticed, we, the Nagios Plugins Development
> >Team, renamed the "Nagios Plugins" to "Monitoring Plugins".
> >
> >Why?
> 
> Yes, Why? Seems like Nagios has a slightly different opinion, ...
> why can't you guys play nice?

I'll spare you from the stories that would illustrate how we tried our
very best to do just that.

I'll also spare you from my appreciation of notions such as "the current
team getting out of control" when talking about the volunteers who took
care of the actual plugin maintenance over the past several years.

Instead, I'm going to respond with the simple facts that presumably led
to the current happenings.  I can only assure you that I'm not omitting
anything relevant that I'm aware of, and that I'm not consciously
misrepresenting anything.  If anyone from Nagios Enterprises is reading
this and believes that I got my facts wrong, please let us know.

So here you go.

A few months ago, Ethan Galstadt sent me a private email (instead of
posting to our internal team@ list that he was also subscribed to).  He
asked me (personally) to remove the references to Icinga and Shinken
from the following sentence on our home page (plus a link to an #Icinga
IRC channel on the /support.html page):

| We, the Nagios Plugins Development Team, maintain a bundle of more than
| fifty standard plugins for Nagios, Icinga, Shinken, and other monitoring
| applications.

I talked to the other team members and sent a response the same day.  If
Nagios Enterprises continues to assert they got no response, I'm happy
to compare mail server logs.  Of course they received it.

This was my response (with Ethan's text snipped):

| Hi Ethan,
| 
| > [...]
| 
| for what it's worth, let me clarify that I'm not involved in either of
| these projects.  Personally, I use Nagios, and I have no plans on
| switching to something else.  I'm mentioning this just in case you're
| worried the description on our web site might be a sign of a creeping
| "hostile takeover" or something.  It is not.
| 
| That said, the Plugins team understands itself as independent of all
| projects that use the Plugins, including Nagios itself.  As far as I
| know, you explicitly agreed with this stance.  In my view, this would
| include the definition of the purpose of the Nagios Plugins site; within
| reasonable constraints, of course.
| 
| It's obvious that mentioning competing products is not in the direct
| interest of Nagios Enterprises, so I understand where you're coming
| from.  The issue is that our interest doesn't fully line up with yours.
| While I'm not interested in causing Nagios Enterprises any financial
| harm whatsoever, I work on the project in my free time (as opposed to
| being paid for maximizing your profit), so I'm happy with anyone who
| uses (and contributes to) the Plugins.  The more users, the better.
| 
| I would ask you to shrug this issue off as the price to pay for having a
| team take care of the project in their free time.  I'm not looking for
| any sort of conflict, I'm trying to act fairly (e.g. by mentioning the
| roots of the Plugins project in the first sentence on the home page),
| and I hope you can live with this level of independence.
| 
| Take care, Holger

That's it.  The next thing that happend was that they copied our web
site and pointed <http://nagios-plugins.org/> to their web server.

None of the team members is affiliated with any of the companies in
question.  We just think the text on our home page is an adequate
description of the Plugins project, and that it's totally harmless.  In
retrospect, you might argue that keeping the text wasn't worth the mess,
and I could understand such a viewpoint very well.  However, while I
can't speak for the other team members here, personally I just wouldn't
have felt comfortable with letting Nagios Enterprises dictate such
things upon the team.

Anyway, I hope everyone will be able to form his or her own opinion now.

Let me add one unrelated note to Mike:

>> There will still be a plugins team and it will be the exact same
>> GitHub account even.

Indeed.  We made that possible by renaming our GitHub account
immediately.  You're welcome.

However, you recreated a Git repository from scratch, thereby abandoning
the complete commit history (which dates back to Ethan's initial CVS
commit).  May I suggest you base your repository on ours instead?  That
would make it easier for you and your contributors to work with the
repository, and it wouldn't give those that look into the details such a
bad impression.

Holger