The nagios community wants to keep its open soul

[nap]

Maybe some people do not want to talk in the mailing list but wish to have
an official answer to this open letter : you can vote for it at
http://ideas.nagios.org/a/dtd/22035-3955


Gabès Jean


On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Olivier JAN <ojan at gfi.fr> wrote:

>
>
> It's an alarm call that is raised : after a long period where people
> began to think
> nagios is a dead foss project, we nearly reach a point of no return :
> the author try to
> gag on the community because it's to free!!
>
> Let's get back to the facts : Nagios is still the reference in the
> open source monitoring
> tools, and some serious challengers like Zabbix or Zenoss try to reach
> its place. In the
> open source world, and especially the monitoring one, the real
> strength is not in code
> lines, but in the community around the project. You know the Nagios
> one has been a great
> one during years. Meanwhile, since two years, the lack of presence and
> answer from Ethan
> to proposals from the community legitimately irritate the community.
> As much as a fork,
> named Icinga, arisen a year ago.
>
> Where the story became complex is when we look at the economic sphere
> around Nagios. Like
> a lot of foss that grow a lot, and after have given more than 8 years
> of it's time to
> Nagios, he legitimately create a support enterprise behind it, "Nagios
> Enterprise". The
> Icinga fork came from community members that are also employees of
> another society that
> supports Nagios : Netways. If the GPLv2 license of Nagios was
> respected, it seems more
> like a business fork than a foss one for the nagios author. That had
> irritate Nagios
> author and the major part of the community have stay in the Nagios project.
>
> Unfortunately, this story have a side effect : we are thinking Ethan
> began to turn
> against the community, and this open spirit that allow this fork, by
> ignore even more the
> community and refuse to answer to code enhancement proposals.
> Last but not least affront : he ask the DNS entry of the French nagios
> community site
> (http://www.nagios-fr.org) to be give to him so he can raised a new
> community, more
> corporate : in this site we can see some posts about the felon (but
> open source and
> nagios relative) Icinga project! This fork seem to have finally more
> cut Ethan author and
> the community than the community into two parts.
>
> That's the last straw for a community who want to be as free as foss
> it supports. In Open
> Source, we have "free as in beer" but also "free as in speech". I, as
> the leader of the
> French community, and with the support of community members, answer
> him that it will be
> be tolerated to be dictate laws about what the community can speak
> about. To do not risk
> an hypothetical sue from Nagios Enterprise (for trademark protection),
> we have decided to
> migrate the site to monitoring-fr.org and to gave the nagios-fr.org
> site to Nagios
> enterprise when the migration will be finished.
>
> With this open letter entitle "The nagios community wants to keep its
> open soul", the
> community ask where the project is going and if it will still be open
> and ethically
> respectful of the open source spirit. Some question raised about the
> real open aspect of
> the Nagios future by freezing the current open source part and put it
> into a close
> solution (Nagios XI, close application based on Nagios, soon available
> from Nagios
> Enterprise) that seem to be the only part that will evolve in the
> future. The community
> also ask how it's seen in the Nagios project, if it still have is its
> place into it and
> if it must hold its tongue about what is not "corporate" for Nagios
> Enterprise.
>
> The community want to help on the industrialization and support of
> Nagios by free
> software business, but still want to keep its soul. The community wish
> Nagios keep it's
> first rank, that was give to it by the community, and the project came
> back to "the old
> good time" when foss developers and people who just want to help had
> yet their words to
> say against marketing communication.
>
> We wish this open letter will not be a dead letter, because this will
> finish to dig the
> gap between the author and its community, that represent a major part
> of the project's
> power, and will not finish by a fork that will divided again the
> community, and will add
> another taboo name in all sites that speak about Nagios.
>
> Signed by:
> *The French community
> *Olivier Jan, writer of a french book bout Nagios, and leader of the
> french community
> *Gabes Jean, writer of another french book about Nagios
> *Gerhard Lausser, writer of a german book about Nagios
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval
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proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance.
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