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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."
Looks like Nagios Plugins was a community project to provide plugins for Nagios, with little to no input by Nagios themselves. At some point in the past, the website name was transferred to Nagios to avoid trademark issues but the project continued to be community driven and led. Now, Nagios has redirected the DNS to its own plugins website, forked the community codebase, setup an entirely new developer base and taken the company line that "monitoring plugins (the name chosen by the original nagios-plugins project leads) is the fork, not us".
Reading the propaganda by the Nagios rep on the bugzilla thread is highly amusing, smacks of Eurasia and East Asia from 1984.
If all of this is even mildly true, its quite an evil thing by Nagios to do.
The story is a but more than that - they took the website almost as-is, forked the codebase and are portraying themselves as the original project with a new developer base, insisting the original developers are the fork.
If they had switched the domain to a brand new website and started from scratch, that would be your non-story...
No, but Nagios hasn't cared much about it's users for some time now. 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.
[1]: Well O.K, there's OpenNMS, but that's network oriented rather than infrastructure so it's not a direct comparison.
Yeah, and that would hold weight if you weren't using their trademark all over your site.
I think you don't get it... the Nagios Plugins project pre-dated Nagios. The Nagios Plugins Project was renamed from The NetSaint plugins project due to trademark issues. Nagios was an acronym for "Nagios Aint gonna insist on Sainthood"
The open source project was using the name before Nagios Enterprises was founded, and these development teams, therefore have prior use of the name Nagios.
They were apparently tricked into handing over control of the domain to the guy who founded Nagios enterprises later.
The funny thing is, that Nagios Enterprises didn't write Nagios 4.0 - that work was done by Andreas Ericsson who works for op5. So instead, you should call "Nagios 4 Core" "op5 Core" if you're looking for the who-did-write-it. The sad thing is, that Nagios Enterprises kicked out Andreas Ericsson out of the Nagios core development after recognizing that people actually knew that Andreas was the only core developer at that time - working for a competitor. Andreas forked Nagios 4 into Naemon abandoning the dictatorship by Nagios Enterprises. You may find their website interesting but there more interesting read is located here in terms of the Nagios Plugins project: https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009432.html If you're interested in more details, the announcement happened on last years OSMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbbyyNIiHc So other than the clusterfuck by Nagios Enterprises in regards of lying to the community again, they've lost their last core developer and there are fellow forks around the corner filling the gap. If you're questioning yourself - I am the lead core dev of Icinga, but what's written here is my sole personal opinion.