As a software engineer, I like what I see. As a friend of Ethan's and a longtime Nagios community member, this is just sad.

The way I see it though, it's not too late to salvage this yet, but it would require quite a lot of work on Ethan's part, and a lot of goodwill from the newly founded Icinga team.

Nagios' problem is, as stated, that Ethan is both inactive and the single bottleneck for all new patches and functionality that the community wants to include into the core one way or another. A solution to this would ofcourse be to be more free with handing out commit access and making the Nagios project more of a team effort. Ethan doesn't scale, but the community does. A second issue is the name "Nagios" which related projects are being prevented from using. I have no idea where that stemmed from, but I'd wish Nagios Enterprises would stop doing it for non-profit organisations. It does create a lot of irritation in that part of the community which actually works hard to make Nagios a better product for its end users.

Icinga's problem is that it has a community of zero users, and I suppose a bit of ill-will due to their attempts at pirating the community away from Nagios. Two of icinga's main goals are also at cross-purposes with already public projects to solve much the same things, available for download at git.op5.org (New PHP gui and reports with bells and whistles). This presents an opportunity for a truly interesting mess; If Icinga steps away from Nagios compatibility (in pretty much any part, really), op5 will be forced to either continue supporting Nagios, or, if Ethan doesn't wake up and start maintaining, we'll have to create our own fork. We'd be better at it than Icinga, but the community shares for each of the three projects would be decidedly smaller than that of a single project, if that project was properly maintained.

So... Solutions? I have none, but I have hopes.

I hope Ethan wakes up and starts working with the community again, and that he does so because it's fun.

I hope Ethan moves to a DSCM and provides push access to prominent contributors in the community.

I hope Icinga forks from that DSCM, and uses the same DSCM to maintain their own code so that a future merge becomes as painless as possible.

I hope Icinga releases their code early, so they don't fall into the pitfall of keeping things in the dark, promising "any day now we'll have something that's technically superior to what Nagios has". I searched their site but found no source there now, so presumably they have nothing to show yet. This makes the programmer in me go "ouch, do they suck that much?"

I hope this isn't just a political stunt to get Ethan to come out of hiding. If it is, it's very bad form. Put up the code and I'll have no doubts this is genuine anymore ;-)

I hope Icinga keeps their promises of staying 100% nagios- compatible. op5 doesn't want to fork upstream projects, but we may have to to keep API's and whatnot stable.

I hope that in a few months time, Nagios' steering is changed to prevent single-person bottlenecks, and that at least parts of the Icinga team are among those who expand the bottleneck.

I hope the Icinga team realizes what a monumental task they're setting out on. Creating a popular opensource project takes a lot more than just creating a technically superior piece of software. The nagios addons have been riding on the Nagios community (while at the same time cheering it on and doing a lot of the work, ofcourse). Icinga will start by swimming upstream. Noone has heard of it, and nobody uses it yet. Nagios OTOH is widely known as *the* opensource network monitoring tool.

Time will tell which of these hopes are in vain and which turn out to be unfounded worries. It always does.

-- Andreas Ericsson andr...@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231

Register now for Nordic Meet on Nagios, June 3-4 in Stockholm http://nordicmeetonnagios.op5.org/

Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war on peace.

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