[HEADS UP] New project name: Monitoring Plugins

[William Leibzon]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Michael Friedrich
<michael.friedrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16.01.2014 22:48, L. V. Lammert wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>
> Because Nagios Enterprises tries to censor every mention of any fork.
> Mention Icinga on your website containing nagios in your domain, say
> nagios-portal.org - ban hammer & domain lost. Claim Icinga copyright on your
> patches at tracker.nagios.org  - banned. Wikipedia article mentions Icinga
> and other forks - Nagios Enterprise users edit the page and get banned by
> Wikipedia for being a sock puppet. More on that fights at
> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/comment/79247#comment-79247

I'll give you my personal opinion since we're discussing it.

I think this all started with people at Netways. I was under the
opinion that they way they were doing things (with nagiosexchange but
also a few other projects) was as if they were trying to take project
away Ethan while promoting their own software and company. I was very
reluctant to add my plugins to their site because it was not official
nagios and they were promoting themselves too much. I also had private
discussions with them in regards to some of my own work and they
refused to allow me to contribute unless I give up copyright to them,
which I refused because this is not how its done in open-source unless
copyright holder is a neutral organization. At the time ICINGA
appeared there were also quite a few other software packages based on
nagios that did not actually fork it. There was no need to fork and
force the issue. And that it happened got Ethan really really
irritated and strongly in favor of keeping nagios private for his own
company.

> Kicking Andreas Ericsson out of the Nagios Core development team, who wrote
> 99% of Nagios 4 and then let him fork Naemon? Priceless. (you might need to
> see the full presentation from last years OSMC:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbbyyNIiHc )

Andreas did major rework on nagios3->nagios4. Its really good work.
But he is really hard on policing what goes into core and not allowing
fully joined development. This happens in open-source regularly when
lead developer is a bit of a nazi but this does not promote
cooperation and growth of the project and without new developers
project stagnates. I told him all that privately.

All that said kicking him off core team was absolutely wrong thing to
do, and shows Nagios & Ethan's interest in keeping project private
rather than truly open-source. There were other solutions available
that would not cause yet another split in the community. Some time ago
in private I tried proposing having a technical review/advisory board
of about 5 people so that there would not be one person making
decisions on the core and the decisions and work on the core would be
more transparent to the open-source community. There was not enough
interest and without multiple people a board like this a split was not
surprising.

I'm quite disappointed how because of their personal egos and/or
business interests the developers couldn't work together to continue
the project in open-source collaborative way. Multiple forks is bad
for everyone and actually means less contributions and development.
Notice how Shinken does not have this issue where as original nagios
core code development does.

> ** Rather ask Nagios Enterprises if the value of defending their trademark
> is worth loosing a community full of qualified developers & users. **
>
> I welcome and appreciate the project's decision to overcome the censorship
> enforced by Nagios Enterprises and freely commit to Nagios and its forks -
> Icinga, Shinken, Naemon, Centreon Engine, Opsview, etc
>
> That makes me believe that this project is _free_ and follows the true open
> source community spirit - it keeps me motivated to start sending them
> patches from which i've stepped back in the past due to the unclear
> situation.

I've stepped back from working on Nagios core code work because of how
people who control its development have been acting. But I basically
have my own fork, I just keep it private for my own customers use
only. For now until things are more clear I'm not sending any patches
to anyone.

Do note that unlike many people involved, I'm someone who does not
have commercial interest with any of these companies or projects. I do
private consulting and can work with any of the projects. And all this
is < 20% of my time as I'm not full-time devops with any company or
full-time open-source developer. This is just something extra I kept
being involved in when I went to academia because I liked nagios. But
all this drama will make me rethink if I should continue and in what
way despite that I've been involved in nagios in some way for over 10
years.

Again, this is just my own personal opinion. And I do hope things get
together in this community.

P.S. One other thing I've been unhappy about with Nagios was their
decision to drop mail lists. I don't have the time to read forums and
as an "old school" open-source person I like mail lists. Not that I
comment that often anyway but major things I do read on.

> That's my personal opinion, not my Icinga one.
>
> best regards,
> Michael
>
> PS: I've taken the liberty to notify package maintainers about the changed
> upstream url.
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054340
> https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859105
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=185829
> OpenBSD response: "I've updated URLs, thanks for pointing this out."
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498292
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nagios-plugins/
> --
> DI (FH) Michael Friedrich
>
> mail:     michael.friedrich at gmail.com
> twitter:  https://twitter.com/dnsmichi
> jabber:   dnsmichi at jabber.ccc.de
> irc:      irc.freenode.net/icinga dnsmichi
>
> icinga open source monitoring
> position: lead core developer
> url:      https://www.icinga.org
>