Talk To a Successful Free Software Project Leader

Nagios (formerly known as NetSaint) is a GPL network monitor software project that's been getting a lot of buzz lately among *Nix sysadmins. Nagios is unquestionably a free software success story even if it's not as high profile as Apache or Linux. Ethan Galstad leads the project. Perhaps he can tell us why Nagios has done so well, so that other free software projects can enjoy similar success. Usual Slashdot interview rules; post your question below, we'll email 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Ethan about 24 hours after this post appears, and publish his answers soon after he gets them back to us.

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what it is (from the official site)

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Nagios® is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Does that mean it can predict when a Windows system tries to use my network before the enduser gets a bluescreen? Woah; that's impressive.