Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!

[matthias eble]

On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 10:56 -0500, Ethan Galstad wrote:

Hi all,

> 1. Nagios is NOT dead.  It's been around for 10 years now and will
> continue to be alive and well for many more to come.

Great to hear.

> 2. While it may appear that things are slow to the community, many
> things are happening behind the scenes, including:
> ...
>   From what I can tell from our experiences with them thus far,
> Netways appears to be using "the community" to exploit the Nagios
> project.  Their actions have endangered Nagios and its future.

Wow. This sounds pretty heavy. While I definitely don't want to start a
flame-war here and I also don't know what your correspondence was all
about, I think they also do good things. Like starting nagiosexchange
which was a great benefit for Nagios and its users IMO. So I think about
the Nagios conference which was (AFAIK) the first of its kind. I also
felt the netways guys to be quite reasonable although I didn't have much
dealings with them.
Okay. I haven't seen (or can't remember) any upstream work done by
netways but to me that's also the case for many other companies that
make money with nagios. 

>   If we
> weren't having to deal with headaches they caused, I would have had more
> time in the past few months to actually do development.

Ok. I Can't judge this. But to me, nobody would have thought about
forking if somebody would have known a current status about what's
actually going on with the project. Either posted to nagios-devel,
community.nagios.org or whatever.

> 4. Big things are coming around the bend for Nagios.  Big things take
> time.  Be patient for a bit longer and you'll see the results.

You know, it is *so* hard to count on such a statement. What the heck is
so Area51 about all that? 
What is a bit longer. Is it a year, is it some days, weeks, months? Is
it something we/I actually want or need or like?
Will it be freely (as in freedom) available? Will it include submitted
patches?
Whats so secret about that to not even tell anybody? Not even the
community advisory board which I felt to be such a great chance. 

Why should anyone consider submitting a cool patch to nagios in these
days? Who should even consider starting some development on the core
when there's no real chance to see the patches committed? Maybe they are
all obsolete because "Big things are coming around the bend soon" but
soon has not been specified for at least half of a year, now.

You see the community's problem?

Even if these "big things" would turn out to be nothing in the end. The
community wouldn't have much of a problem with that IMO. But we'd so
much like to know what's actually going on, so that we (all) can
continue improving Nagios to "rightfully claim its spot as the
undisputed king of monitoring".

I personally see no reason why any news should be held back until the
next conference. The community is so much wider spread than this one
conference room somwhere on this planet.

I'd be really happy to read a reply
Matthias



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