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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.
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.
They (Nagios Enterprises) requested it. I didn't see mention of why they did, but I would guess it was trademark issue. They were supposed to let them use it independent of Nagios Enterprises, but seems like 3 years was all they could get on this deal. From what I read in their discussion, reason for takeover are mentions of compatible competition on main site of old Nagios Plugins.
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.
You apparently decided to read the article on this occasion, but inexplicably stopped after the second link.
3.3/10 for effort but could try harder.
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...
It's quite a mess they have made, they expect us (the users) to just accept a new team under same name.
Well fuck that. Hope package maintainers are on top of this and make sure users are forced to make a choice of which plugin distribution to use.
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.
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.
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.
Dick move? You better believe it. Piss off a sizable community? Hell yes. Perfectly legal? Yup. The right way to do it to avoid future liability? Unfortunately, most likely.
That reminds me of a saying I once heard: "we will have world peace when the last lawyer is strangled with the entrails of the last banker."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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
"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.
If all of this is even mildly true, its quite an evil thing by Nagios to do.
It sure puts a new spin on the Nagios Enterprises side of the Icinga fork... So, who still thinks Icinga was making stuff up?