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Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios
New submitter hymie! writes "Nagios is a commonly used IT tool that monitors computers, networks, and websites. It supports the use of plug-ins, many of which were developed independently by the community. Holger Weiß, formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that 'Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by Nagios. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. This means we cannot use the name 'Nagios Plugins' any longer.' Further discussion is available in a Bugzilla thread."
is not a viable long term strategy.
This sounds like a plain and simple copyright violation in many ways.
Sue Nagios.
So far I have not looked back once.
You have to admit, the two names are rather similar. One might reasonably assume they're run by the same people.
So why did you give Nagios control of your domain again?
The summary made it sound like a domain registrar just transferred the name without their permission, but that totally is not the case according to the article:
In the past, the domain "nagios-plugins.org" pointed to a server maintained by us, the Nagios Plugins Development Team. The domain itself had been transferred to Nagios Enterprises a few years ago, but we had an agreement that the project would continue to be independently run by the actual plugin maintainers.
So really the company just decided they want control of the server now instead of pointing their domain to a third party. Nonstory.
It will be interesting to see who will provide source for packages used by various distros. Those plugins can be used by other monitoring applications and I guess that new maintainers on the old domain could release version of their plugins that would not work with competition, while at the same time old maintainers probably shouldn't use nagios-plugins for their packages.
It would have been a better story if the takeover was done using the Nagios tool itself.
Why did nagios take out the server out the hands of the community. Was there a fight in the community? Is this just a "it is named nagios, so it is ours"? Want do to some subscribtion? Sombody in the community took to big consulting fees?
At first it looks like that nagios has a name to loose, and more work to do by maintaining a lot of plugins and a extra site.
After having the good fortune to spend a few weeks testing everything free, I've got to spend a minute evangelizing for Zabbix.
It took me a week to understand the concepts, but the clone button and templates make Zabbix my favorite tool. The local Zabbix agent on each host gives detailed metrics and the screens of graphs are great.
Check out the appaloosa-zabbix-templates for more MySQL and Memcache charts than you ever thought might work out of the box.
Zabbix is ridiculously powerful, from auto discovery on subnets, to simple ping and snmp, up through more advanced tools.
What a shameless plug !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Someone had to plug the better open source monitor. Icinga (https://www.icinga.org/) is either a fork from nagios 2 or a rebuilt but either way has config file level compatibility with your nagios configs. A way saner architecture for writing add-ons and a better web ui.
Without a brand you have no company.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Nagios is a stupid name, and now they are acting like a stupid company. You can't buy good will, but you can certainly spend it out of existence. Create an entity sys-monitoring.org, or something, pull a GPL nagios, change trademarks, and point to monitoring-plugins.org. That really is the only way to deal with companies that behave this way.
Then contact Debian, RedHat et. al. they will probably deal with the new fork after this crap.
adios
They all seem pretty despicable at this point.
The drama with the parent and its forks seems to have a long and jaded history:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/comment/79247#comment-79247
The best thing we slashdotters can do is treat them all like trolls - no soup for you, trolls!
In the future plugin developers should make their plugins compatible with alternatives but incompatible with Nagios. Then Naagios can either live with the old plugins or hire people to port the new plugins. Then Nagios can see what the community meant to them. This is a typical business approach which says that the enemy is not your competitors but your user community and the community of people who add value to your product. Time these users got a clue.
Holy cow...
http://assets.nagios.com/datasheets/compare/How_Nagios_Compares_To_Icinga.pdf
That's a lot of checkmarks! And we all know how much IT managers LOVE those checkmarks (and hate "legal risks" and "high developer turnover". I like how the icinga checkmarks are light gray and the nagios checks are "blazin' blue".
Lessons learned:
You know a product is the most awesome of them all when it gets a check mark for every single point compared.
Creepy? Howzabout "disgusting"?
IANAL but I doubt there's anything in trademark law that would allow the Nagios team to appropriate the work of the Nagios Plugin team wholesale the way they did and merely change the name of the team members. While I hate the term, this looks like it could be a blatant example of ``intellectual property'' theft. Was the Nagios team unable to come up with their own wen site? Really? Rights to the domain name don't give you rights to the work that went into creating the plugin web site.
After having used it for 6-7 years, Nagios just went off my list of recommended monitoring tools. Icinga just moved to the top.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Holy shit we have a new argument in the IP debate! IP laws cause IP theft it's fucking bulletproof!
Really though this is an instance of IP laws causing IP theft which is just...deliciously ironic.
"It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins."
So it appears their business strategy moving forward was to leverage the domain registration to allow them to present their fork as the original product, then alter the plugins to be incompatible with the competition.
Sure the original project will keep going at mobility-plugins, but the 'big fish' customers might not be able to see past the name/domain.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"nagios-plugins is not a fork, but a rebase with new team members. monitoring-plugins is indeed a fork, as their new name suggests."
That is rich.
Open source developers support projects for many reasons, money is obvious not one of them. Reasons like giving back to the community, working with a community with like mindsets, the status of working on an open source project, etc.. While there is loyalty to a project, it is a mutual two way street. When b.s. like this happens, the open source developers leave and go to competitive projects. I don't understand how companies figure that people are just assets that are easily replaced. There's years of knowledge and understanding of why code was developed in a certain way and method. That is lost when your core developers leave.
FYI, it's = it is/has.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Time to research the alternatives. I have suggested Nagios to many people over the years.
The article makes a good point. We need to ditch the threaded slashdot UI in favor of news articles being posted to a Bugzilla instance for comment (Or at the very least adding a moderation 'WORKSFORME')
There's no place like
Did you and your company honestly expect people to just keep going along with you after a dramatic and hostile fork? - Sam Kottler
"Hostile fork" indeed.