It's an alarm call that is raised : after a long period where people began to think nagios is a dead foss project, we nearly reach a point of no return : the author try to gag on the community because it's to free!!

Let's get back to the facts : Nagios is still the reference in the open source monitoring tools, and some serious challengers like Zabbix or Zenoss try to reach its place. In the open source world, and especially the monitoring one, the real strength is not in code lines, but in the community around the project. You know the Nagios one has been a great one during years. Meanwhile, since two years, the lack of presence and answer from Ethan to proposals from the community legitimately irritate the community. As much as a fork, named Icinga, arisen a year ago.

Where the story became complex is when we look at the economic sphere around Nagios. Like a lot of foss that grow a lot, and after have given more than 8 years of it's time to Nagios, he legitimately create a support enterprise behind it, "Nagios Enterprise". The Icinga fork came from community members that are also employees of another society that supports Nagios : Netways. If the GPLv2 license of Nagios was respected, it seems more like a business fork than a foss one for the nagios author. That had irritate Nagios author and the major part of the community have stay in the Nagios project.

Unfortunately, this story have a side effect : we are thinking Ethan began to turn against the community, and this open spirit that allow this fork, by ignore even more the community and refuse to answer to code enhancement proposals. Last but not least affront : he ask the DNS entry of the French nagios community site (http://www.nagios-fr.org) to be give to him so he can raised a new community, more corporate : in this site we can see some posts about the felon (but open source and nagios relative) Icinga project! This fork seem to have finally more cut Ethan author and the community than the community into two parts.

That's the last straw for a community who want to be as free as foss it supports. In Open Source, we have "free as in beer" but also "free as in speech". I, as the leader of the French community, and with the support of community members, answer him that it will be be tolerated to be dictate laws about what the community can speak about. To do not risk an hypothetical sue from Nagios Enterprise (for trademark protection), we have decided to migrate the site to monitoring-fr.org and to gave the nagios-fr.org site to Nagios enterprise when the migration will be finished.

With this open letter entitle "The nagios community wants to keep its open soul", the community ask where the project is going and if it will still be open and ethically respectful of the open source spirit. Some question raised about the real open aspect of the Nagios future by freezing the current open source part and put it into a close solution (Nagios XI, close application based on Nagios, soon available from Nagios Enterprise) that seem to be the only part that will evolve in the future. The community also ask how it's seen in the Nagios project, if it still have is its place into it and if it must hold its tongue about what is not "corporate" for Nagios Enterprise.

The community want to help on the industrialization and support of Nagios by free software business, but still want to keep its soul. The community wish Nagios keep it's first rank, that was give to it by the community, and the project came back to "the old good time" when foss developers and people who just want to help had yet their words to say against marketing communication.

We wish this open letter will not be a dead letter, because this will finish to dig the gap between the author and its community, that represent a major part of the project's power, and will not finish by a fork that will divided again the community, and will add another taboo name in all sites that speak about Nagios.

Signed by: *The French community *Olivier Jan, writer of a french book bout Nagios, and leader of the french community *Gabes Jean, writer of another french book about Nagios *Gerhard Lausser, writer of a german book about Nagios

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