Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!

[Andreas Ericsson]

As a software engineer, I like what I see. As a friend of Ethan's
and a longtime Nagios community member, this is just sad.

The way I see it though, it's not too late to salvage this yet, but
it would require quite a lot of work on Ethan's part, and a lot of
goodwill from the newly founded Icinga team.

Nagios' problem is, as stated, that Ethan is both inactive and the
single bottleneck for all new patches and functionality that the
community wants to include into the core one way or another.
A solution to this would ofcourse be to be more free with handing
out commit access and making the Nagios project more of a team
effort. Ethan doesn't scale, but the community does.
A second issue is the name "Nagios" which related projects are
being prevented from using. I have no idea where that stemmed from,
but I'd wish Nagios Enterprises would stop doing it for non-profit
organisations. It does create a lot of irritation in that part of
the community which actually works hard to make Nagios a better
product for its end users.

Icinga's problem is that it has a community of zero users, and I
suppose a bit of ill-will due to their attempts at pirating the
community away from Nagios. Two of icinga's main goals are also
at cross-purposes with already public projects to solve much the
same things, available for download at git.op5.org (New PHP gui
and reports with bells and whistles).
This presents an opportunity for a truly interesting mess; If
Icinga steps away from Nagios compatibility (in pretty much any
part, really), op5 will be forced to either continue supporting
Nagios, or, if Ethan doesn't wake up and start maintaining, we'll
have to create our own fork. We'd be better at it than Icinga,
but the community shares for each of the three projects would
be decidedly smaller than that of a single project, if that
project was properly maintained.

So... Solutions? I have none, but I have hopes.

I hope Ethan wakes up and starts working with the community
again, and that he does so because it's fun.

I hope Ethan moves to a DSCM and provides push access to
prominent contributors in the community.

I hope Icinga forks from that DSCM, and uses the same DSCM
to maintain their own code so that a future merge becomes
as painless as possible.

I hope Icinga releases their code early, so they don't fall
into the pitfall of keeping things in the dark, promising "any
day now we'll have something that's technically superior to
what Nagios has". I searched their site but found no source
there now, so presumably they have nothing to show yet. This
makes the programmer in me go "ouch, do they suck that much?"

I hope this isn't just a political stunt to get Ethan to come
out of hiding. If it is, it's very bad form. Put up the code
and I'll have no doubts this is genuine anymore ;-)

I hope Icinga keeps their promises of staying 100% nagios-
compatible. op5 doesn't want to fork upstream projects, but
we may have to to keep API's and whatnot stable.

I hope that in a few months time, Nagios' steering is changed
to prevent single-person bottlenecks, and that at least parts
of the Icinga team are among those who expand the bottleneck.

I hope the Icinga team realizes what a monumental task they're
setting out on. Creating a popular opensource project takes
a lot more than just creating a technically superior piece of
software. The nagios addons have been riding on the Nagios
community (while at the same time cheering it on and doing a
lot of the work, ofcourse). Icinga will start by swimming
upstream. Noone has heard of it, and nobody uses it yet. Nagios
OTOH is widely known as *the* opensource network monitoring
tool.

Time will tell which of these hopes are in vain and which turn
out to be unfounded worries. It always does.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Register now for Nordic Meet on Nagios, June 3-4 in Stockholm
 http://nordicmeetonnagios.op5.org/

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
on peace.

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