The nagios community wants to keep its open soul

[nap]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:00 PM, anthony paradis <funkyman78 at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I expect a professional response from you
> >
>
> 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
>
> But alright, I'll come in with a professional response here.
>
> Most software projects expect the users who want features in the core
> code to develop those features themselves and submit patches that
> can be discussed and polished to perfection. The Nagios community
> works a bit differently. Users are crying out for new features, although
> they're often not very specific about what those features are supposed
> to be, and even more rarely users post patches to make that particular
> feature happen.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
> easily be implemented outside the nagios core, and there's currently
> at least two teams working on making that true. One is at op5 and
> the other is the icinga team.
>
> * Clustering/redundancy/loadbalancing/failover stuff. A lot of
> competent programmers (Nagios core devs included) all agree that
> such a feature needn't reside inside the Nagios core itself, but would
> be much better off written as a module. DNX, Merlin and other efforts
> are under way and are nearing production quality or are already on
> it.
>
> * New statusmap. Well, we at op5 have developed several already.
> They're free for grabs, since we've made sure to publish all our git
> repositories. You want to fly around in a 3d landscape in a java app?
> It's there for the taking. You want something that works with google
> maps and lets you draw whatever you want on a map? That too is
> already there, contributed back to NagVis, which we decided to use
> for that particular thing. You want something where hostgroups and
> their parent relations are drawn? lo and behold, we have that too.
> Download it and install it. If you can't figure out how to make it work,
> that's a different issue that we can work with after you've tried and
> failed.
>
> * Web frontend for configuration
> Nacoma (the op5 written tool) has been opensource and totally
> free for the past year or so. Go grab it. It works wonderfully for
> our 400+ customers and we actively develop it.
>
> * SLA reporting tool
> Again, it's up for grabs from the op5 git repositories. Just download
> and install it and you'll have corporate quality reports. Again, we do
> actively develop it.
>
> Besides the above ones, many of the suggestions on ideas.nagios.org
> are already implemented or could easily be implemented by someone
> who really cares about the feature requested. But people are lazy and
> seem to be scared of ending up maintaining a software project, though
> they have no hesitation asking someone else to do what they really
> don't want to or can do.
>
> The shameful part are all the requests for things that already exists.
> I can understand non-developers asking coders for features, but I
> have a hard time respecting people who can't even be bothered to
> google for something they claim they want, and then whine about
> it when they don't get it.
>
> So if I resume the current situation, on one side we have a foss project
leader that:
*send "drama" jokes (that make no one really hilarious in fact)
*between two personals attacks say that a community site cannot talk about
what they want
*still do not answer about the roadmap (yes, even with all tries to do not
answer it, we still need an answer...) of the foss part
*try to get all steps of "How to destroy your community"
http://lwn.net/Articles/370157/ (steps 4, 5, 6, no more 9 but a great 10)

And in the other side : you
*always answer to the community, even for quite original proposals...
*try to make all people work with each others
*succeed at resolving all top 5 ideas of nagios
*(even try to resolve the hidden first one by answering to this open letter)

...

Is this a problem for you if I consider you as the current Nagios foss
leader?


Jean


> --
> Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
> OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
> Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231
>
> 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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Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval
Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs
proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance.
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