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.

Comments

Re:what it is (from the official site)

[Tet]

Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

That's great for interactive use, but Nagios (along with Big Brother, and most other monitoring packages) doesn't seem to cater well to automating report generation from outside of a web browser. We need to generate weekly reports on the number of outages, etc., and would like to be able to schedule a cron job every Sunday night to say "get me the uptime stats for abc services, so I can put them into xyz reporting package". We need to take the raw data and calculate rolling averages, etc, to give to customers (we're contractully obliged to do so). I.e., the sort of reports we need are typically more complex than is reasonable to expect Nagios to do internally. Was the interactive bias a deliberate decision, or did it just evolve that way. More importantly, are there any plans to improve things in this area?

mass-appeal software

[feldsteins]

How can the sucess of geeky sysadmin software be translated into open source projects aimed at a wider audience? Put simply, can the open source model work beyond nerdy sysadmin widgets and spill into the world of mass-appeal software?