451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Nagios fork – commercial growing pains, commercial interests
Jay Lyman, May 8, 2009 @ 2:17 pm ETOpen source eyes are watching the latest fork, this time Icinga, a new offshoot of the widely-used open source monitoring software Nagios. The fork and its impetus appear to center on a community desire for faster, wider, more open development, but it seems there may indeed be another prong to this fork.
Netways, a German company that supports and contributes to Nagios, is among those behind Icinga. As the new project team’s site indicates, ‘This team currently consists of members of the previous Nagios community advisory board, developers of numerous Nagios extensions and Netways, the organiser of the Conference on Nagios and provider of the NagiosExchange platform.’ Although it is certainly natural and even beneficial to have some commercial backing of a fork, the extent to which this represents Netways’ efforts to establish itself as the German company and community for Nagios seems unclear. I would also add that this is the only reference from Icinga on Netways, other than the team page which highlights three of seven founding members working on Netways-related projects with Nagios. Again, it is good to see vendor involvement, participation and support and Netways has contributed positively to the Nagios community, but there has also been some bad blood between Netways and Nagios Enterprises, the bootstrapped, commercial company based on Nagios and founded by the software’s creator, Ethan Galstad. The dispute centers on trademark issues, both honoring the Nagios U.S. trademark and Netware’s successful move to secure a German trademark for Nagios.
This dispute, along with some perspective on what it all means, is summed up rather objectively and well by Nagios developer Andreas Ericsson here.
While it seems the Icinga fork may have some commercial influences of its own, there is truly a bottleneck issue with the Nagios project, which admittedly was never originally intended for the large, enterprise environments it monitors today. The so-called bottleneck himself, Nagios creator Ethan Galstad, acknowledged there have been holdups in the software’s progress because of his position as sole code gatekeeper. The good news is that Galstad, as well as Ericsson, have recognized the need to change things and plan to do so. I expect we’ll be hearing about some changes in procedures and roles in the Nagios development community shortly. Ericsson has hopes the revamping may bring back the Icinga contributors. While I find this unlikely, I still think the Icinga fork has already served a valid purpose as a form of open source discipline that is forcing project leaders to listen to the community and assess things. I also liken this to Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux, which didn’t hurt Red Hat as much as serve as a necessary check on Red Hat’s Linux business, which was improved with speeded and sharpened support in response.
In the end, the Nagios fork shows how there are certainly growing pains when taking an open source project to widespread enterprise use and business. It also shows that commercial interests are playing a more prominent role, even from the point of inception, in open source software projects and, yes, forks.
Comments (14) Categories: Software
[...] Excerpt from: 451 CAOS Theory » Nagios fork – commercial growing pains … [...]
One should mention that the only contribution from Netways is NagiosGrapher, which is a bit outdated, especially since the original author left the company. There are indeed some other tools they offer for download, but they simply are not production ready and/or very complicated. Intentionally, as rumours say. They want to sell support contracts. And this is probably the reason behind their icinga engagement, too. I don’t understand why the CTO of a company with massive monetary interests became project leader of icinga. It fits exactly their business model to get the hands on nagios. But what’s good for Netways mustn’t be good for the open source community.
[...] it has been discussed already quite widely (e.g. on the 451 CAOS blog) Nagios has been forked. The new project has been called Icinga and a nice website has been [...]
[...] 451 CAOS Theory » Nagios fork – commercial growing pains, commercial interests – Another good article about the Nagios fork… [...]
Ethan Galstad also addresses this topic in his article “Nagios–A Fork in the Road”
http://community.nagios.org/2009/05/11/nagios-a-fork-in-the-road/
[...] 451 CAOS Theory » Nagios fork – commercial growing pains, commercial interests Another good article about the Nagios fork… [...]
[...] hell? We previously reported the Icinga fork of the Nagios open source monitoring software. This week Nagios creator Ethan [...]
[...] end, it is proof of a vibrant, well-supported Linux project and community. Similar to how a fork can serve as a necessary check on an open source project or vendor in a positive way, this nasty public [...]
Well, appart from Nagios Grapher, we created and released about 5 other bigger AddOns for Nagios and at least 50 different Nagios plugins. (see http://www.netways.org). We also created, developed and ran NagiosExchange for more than 5 years now. It was now renamed to MonitoringExchange to fulfill parts of Ethans demands concenrning the trademark issues (http://www.monitoringexchange.org)
It is true that some of our AddOns might be a little complicated but they were made to solve complex problems. e.g. “NETWAYS Portal for Nagios” is a tool to build a ITSM portal solution and integrate data from different sources into one singe portal. That is, by definition, a complicated situation.
[...] be very difficult to promote the add-on to the desired audience. Trademark issues were one of the causes of the Icinga Nagios fork for [...]
[...] the some of the same old concerns of fragmentation with Android, but similar to how I tend to view forking — as a positive check on quality, vitality and future direction — I agree with some of [...]
[...] open source monitoring project, continues to grow its enterprise and cloud presence despite a fork and check on its development last [...]
[...] as we have seen in the case of open source software forks, dissents and competition, these challenges all represent a form of open source discipline that [...]
[...] it has been discussed already quite widely (e.g. on the 451 CAOS blog) Nagios has been forked. The new project has been called Icinga and a nice website has been [...]