Antwort: Re: The nagios community wants to keep its open soul

[Sascha.Runschke at gfkl.com]

Hi Andreas,

> Is it just me who can picture Ethan giggling away at the keyboard while
> he was writing that email? Personally, I thought it was hilarious :D

yes it was - but honestly I don't think it was the best choice in
that particular situation. It was funny, but polemic.

> It's really quite simple. If you have a feature you want implemented,
> you can
> a) submit a patch to make it happen.
> b) whine.
> 
> If you're a positive person (like me), you'll try to make it happen 
first.
> If that fails, you can ask for help with a message like "hey, I tried 
this
> but can't make it work. Here's what I want to achieve and why I think
> that's a really stellar idea. Is anyone else capable of making this 
fly?"
> 
> With that attitude, it's really a breeze to get exactly what you want
> from practically anybody. Demanding nameless features that you're
> not sure what they would do is a surefire way of getting no response
> what so ever.

Well, I sincerely doubt it really works that way.
I'm using Nagios now for like 8 or 9 years or so.
I have seen many ideas coming in over the last 2 years, I've seen
many patches from eager Nagios contributors coming in the last 2 years,
yet I still have to see that eager participation of the president of
Nagios Enterprise (c)(r)[tm]. As already mentioned before, it's not
actually the fact that not everything gets done in an instant, it's
the fact that the president of Nagios Enterprises (c)(r)[tm] does
not seem to care about what community members think or whatnot.
There was no "nice patch, I'll get it in once I get the time" or
"I'm unsure how the patch behaves, please provide me with a test
scenario" or maybe even just a "your patch sucks, go away".

It rather feels like a lot of people are discussing here to no
avail - since the president of Nagios Enterprises (c)(r)[tm]
is busy with business.

> So let's have a look at what requests there are on Nagios. These are
> from ideas.nagios.org, which I assume is a decent collection of ideas
> that people share. I've only bothered with the top five or so, since it
> already shows a very very clear pattern without going further than
> that.

> * New gui. Lots of people want this. Well, that's something that can
[...] 
> * Clustering/redundancy/loadbalancing/failover stuff. A lot of
[...]
> * New statusmap. Well, we at op5 have developed several already.
[...]
> * Web frontend for configuration
[...]
> * SLA reporting tool

Nice - but what about a bugfree core?
Most complaints or wishes I have seen ignored here are actually only
relevant to the core. All others, especially those mentioned above,
are healthy open source projects that react quite quickly to requests,
patches or questions. Let's take NagVis for example - I've contributed
quite some ideas and even a few patches to the project and so far all
of them have been either accepted, commented, denied or delayed for
a future major release by a core dev within a few days.

Ontop of all that is the fact that the president of Nagios
Enterprises (c)(r)[tm] seems to be more busy with prosecuting
websites that make "unofficial" use of the term Nagios (c)(r)[tm]
in a manner that does not fit the president of Nagios
Enterprises (c)(r)[tm]. That's really a shame and the reason is simple:
All those websites and their users out there made Nagios the best
free monitoring tool out there - because they dedicated their time
for finding bugs, writing pathes, free tools, plugins, add-ons and
whatnot. In my humble opinion it was those users that made Nagios a
success - and not that little buggy thing called core. And now
all those people get is a laugh in their face.

We all hoped for changing times, when Ethan went inactive.
Now we do have those changes big time - but I frankly doubt that
anyone but Ethan is happy with them. You might go on with "Nagios
is Ethans baby and he can do what he wants" - yes it is. But
hundreds and thousands of codelines have been supplied by
contributors in good faith and those get the shaft now.

It's just sad to see what happened to a once prospering open source
project. In my humble opinion Nagios is not what I consider an open
source project anymore. It's someone's baby who now tries to
aggressively cash cow it. It more and more looks like Ethan tries
to beauty up the bride to sell out the name asap. I might be wrong,
but my gut feeling and the current incidents make it look like that.

Somehow this reminds me of the Mambo/Joomla drama, where a community
got split because of someone agressively prosecuting his trademark
on mambo and Joomla was born. Oh btw - anyone seen mambo in the
news lately? Me not, Joomla has taken over it's place... come to
think of it.

I didn't provide any patches to nagios back then because
Ethan ignored everything anyway and I considered them a waste
of time. Now I'm really happy I didn't do it and I certainly
won't provide any in the future...

Regards
        Sascha



GFKL Financial Services AG
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