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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.
Sue Nagios.
Are you related to Sally 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...
This battle was lost years ago when this volunteer organisation gave control of their domain to Nagios Enterprises to avoid trademark issues.
So they've been able to continue in their priviliaged position paying Nagios Enterprises SFA for theses years, until finally some mid-level bureaucrat decided that the money they were getting ($0) from nagios-plugins.org community group doesn't outweigh the brand-risk that they pose, and they brought the website back inhouse.
Wow, I would never have seen that coming!!
Sounds to me like Nagios Enterprises is readying its self for sale.
This is the open source business model. Cisco have been at it for years. Get used to it.
Pray they do not alter it further...
You seem to be completely overlooking the issue of copyright. Re-appropriating the domain was apparently within Nagios' rights, but copying the contents of the web site was not. Trademark rights are not virally transmissible to copyright.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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.
"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.