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Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios 119

Posted by Soulskill from the bad-behavior dept.
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."
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Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios More

Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios

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  • Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, 2014 @05:30AM (#46004157)

    is not a viable long term strategy.

    • is not a viable long term strategy.

      Get back to your own damn universe Bizzaro Mark Shuttleworth.

    • Re:Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, 2014 @07:21AM (#46004449)
      No, but Nagios hasn't cared much about it's users for some time now. It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins.

      [1]: Well O.K, there's OpenNMS, but that's network oriented rather than infrastructure so it's not a direct comparison.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Give Zabbix a try, you'll be surprised. Much better flexibilty and easier to tie into active directory for authentication.

        http://www.zabbix.com/

        • Re:Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:4, Informative)

          by jon3k ( 691256 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:22PM (#46009241)
          http://www.zabbix.com/license.php [zabbix.com]

          If you use ZABBIX in a commercial context such that you profit by its use, we ask that you further the development of ZABBIX by purchasing some level of support.

          Just fair warning.

        • IMHO stay away from Zabbix for anything but small-ish environments. For what it's worth, our experience hasn't been great running zabbix in a distributed configuration. Plus, there isn't much flexibility in terms of configuring checks on hosts due to the way templates work.

          Also, their "enterprise support" is a fucking joke. Our support experiences are "chatting" back and forth in a Notepad while a guy fucks around in the mysql DB for a few hours. Total waste of money. =(

      • "It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins."

        So it appears their business strategy moving forward was to leverage the domain registration to allow them to present their fork as the original product, then alter the plugins to be incompatible with the competition.

        Sure the original project will keep going at mobility-plugins, but the 'big fish' customers might not be

      • it's (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        FYI, it's = it is/has.

      • I would argue that they are doing this in the best interests of us, not shitting on us. I for one am glad to see the old maintainers go. They have not been very supportive of us (the community). They constantly had a god-like attitude and seldom helped if anyone had run into an issue. The only people that ever seemed to help were the Nagios company employees. Here is the other side of the fence: http://www.nagios.org/news/77-news-announcements/367-nagios-plugin-team-changes [nagios.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Insightful)
      is not a viable long term strategy.

      Apple: - What?

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Insightful) is not a viable long term strategy.

        Apple: - What?

        You're holding it wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by kelemvor4 ( 1980226 )

        Shitting all over your most supportive users (Score:5, Insightful) is not a viable long term strategy.

        Apple: - What?

        I don't think that was apple's strategy specifically. More of a consequence of being so successful. They just don't care. Apple's strategy is to be fashionable and cool rather than functional. Things seem to be on the decline for the fruity company in my estimation. This behavior will help drive them back into obscurity once again.

  • Copyright violation. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This sounds like a plain and simple copyright violation in many ways.

    Sue Nagios.

    • Re:Copyright violation. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, 2014 @05:37AM (#46004177)

      Sue Nagios.

      Are you related to Sally Nagios?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xQx ( 5744 )

      Yeah, and that would hold weight if you weren't using their trademark all over your site.

      Seems to me this is just an occupational hazard of using somebody else's name for your site.

      • Re:Copyright violation. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:09AM (#46004543) Homepage
        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          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.

          They are if the potential claimant/entity whose rights you are stepping on does not have lawyers, or is otherwise prevented from suing you over the copying.

      • Re:Copyright violation. (Score:5, Informative)

        by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:05AM (#46005277)

        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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree. While the source code of the plugins is licensed GPLv3, and as such may be legally 'forked' (keeping open which project is the forked one), the content of the web site is not. Even though it was always hosted by Nagios Enterprises, it has now been copied to a physically different server (and modified the DNS accordingly). That is a clear copyright violation.
      IMO, Nagios Enterprises could have handled this more elegantly. Reminds me a little of the Mambo / Joomla debacle 9 years ago.

  • Switched to Icinga a long time ago (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, 2014 @05:48AM (#46004203)

    So far I have not looked back once.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      +1

      The switch is trivially easy and all plugins are backwards-compatible. The "classic" UI has every annoyance of Nagios UI fixed. There is a sensible release cycle and authors that accept feedback in their bugtracker.

      Every time I hear people complain about their Nagios love/hate relationship I tell them to switch.

  • You have to admit, the two names are rather similar. One might reasonably assume they're run by the same people.

    • Re:similar (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:05AM (#46004233)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

        A representative of Nagios Enterprise was available to comment on this issue [youtube.com].

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Splab ( 574204 )

        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.

      • 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.

        If all of this is even mildly true, its quite an evil thing by Nagios to do.

        A part of this is foolishness. You can never trust a corp that has been litigious over its brand with ownership of your project or its hosting. Everything should have been copied elsewhere to a domain or hosted url with no TMs, and the old site should have been slowly deprecated and forked.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Looks like Nagios Plugins was a community project to provide plugins for Nagios, with little to no input by Nagios themselves.

        They were a community project to develop plugins. The guy who originally developed the Nagios core software, eventually went on to create Nagios enterprises.

        The NetSaint plugins project was renamed to the Nagios plugins [linuxtoday.com] project in ~2001; The nagios-plugins repo has content going back 9 years.

        Nagios Enterprises company was first founded in 2007. The Nagios Trademark was r

        • I agree with your perspective. Unfortunately, the other details muddy the water:

          The Nagios project on sourceforge was set up in May 2001.

          The Nagios Plugins project on sourceforge was set up in June 2001.

          The owner of the Nagios project later went on to create Nagios Enterprises and register the trademark.

          So while the enterprise didn't exist back then, it is the successor of the project which was using the name first...

      • 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?

  • The summary made it sound like a domain registrar just transferred the name without their permission, but that totally is not the case according to the article:

    In the past, the domain "nagios-plugins.org" pointed to a server maintained by us, the Nagios Plugins Development Team. The domain itself had been transferred to Nagios Enterprises a few years ago, but we had an agreement that the project would continue to be independently run by the actual plugin maintainers.

    So really the company just decided they want control of the server now instead of pointing their domain to a third party. Nonstory.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So really the company just decided they want control of the server now instead of pointing their domain to a third party. Nonstory.

      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.

    • Re:Not a registrar problem. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:17AM (#46004265)

      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...

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

        And if the entire intent was to bring the project under the control of Nagios Enterprises, how exactly would you go about doing that without using your own employees?!?

        Seems the FOSS community, regardless of how many of them actually get up every day and go to work as an employee, have forgotten all about all those legal issues that corporations tend to have to do. And if I was in charge as the project manager to bring this in-house, I'd probably do the exact same thing with a fork of my own people that a

        • 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."

        • You're missing a key point in this - copied web content on nag's site.

      • 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.

        What the fuck man, you are correct. It's almost creepy to watch the /team.html page both at nagios-plugins.org [nagios-plugins.org] and monitoring-plugins.org [monitoring-plugins.org]. The sites look identical but the names on the lists are different.

        • The way on nagios-plugin all of the names have been moved to previous team members and all the current team members happen to be employed by nagios. The way they have removed mention of other solutions. It makes me think there might be more going on than what is in the post as if they are planing to refocus the project on nagios because of something that happened but we are not privy to.

        • 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

          • Holy shit we have a new argument in the IP debate! IP laws cause IP theft it's fucking bulletproof!

            Really though this is an instance of IP laws causing IP theft which is just...deliciously ironic.

  • Distro packaging mess (Score:5, Interesting)

    by paziek ( 1329929 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:09AM (#46004249)

    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.

  • Naigio-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios
    "Nagios is a commonly used IT tool that monitors computers, networks, and websites."
    ...
    "Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission."

    It would have been a better story if the takeover was done using the Nagios tool itself.

  • Alternatives... (Score:2, Informative)

    by ptudor ( 22537 )

    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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zarhan ( 415465 )

      We are currently monitoring six distributed sites using http://mathias-kettner.com/checkmk.html [mathias-kettner.com]. It still relies on Nagios 3.x core, but they are going to replace that soon ("micro-core"). From what I've heard, Nagios development started really going downhill at Nagios 4.0, and this plugin issue is yet one more such symptom.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Nah - it was way before 4.0.

        The core Nagios guys pissed off enough people that various forks had appeared (e.g. Icinga, Shinken etc), and the new forks provided an outlet for years of repressed development/feature ideas that were squelched in Nagios as 'not part of the core of what we do'.

        And as these other projects gained steam and became more popular, the core Nagios folk realised they had some major catch-up work to do, which (iirc) is where 4.0 came from, and seemed to take a bunch more major contributo

        • Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Michael Friedrich ( 2971005 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:09AM (#46005293) Homepage
          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 [monitoring-plugins.org] If you're interested in more details, the announcement happened on last years OSMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbbyyNIiHc [youtube.com] 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.
  • What a shameless plug !

  • Somone had to plug icinga (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:14AM (#46004553)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Michael Friedrich ( 2971005 )
      Actually Icinga was forked off Nagios 3.2.1 and some patches ahead. Meanwhile we've ported plenty of Nagios patches, but also sent them Icinga patches. At some point, they've removed the Icinga copyright on those patches, and banned me from their bug tracker. But since people had been asking quite often, which patches and features are exclusive to Icinga, I had compiled a periodically updated table with all details exposed. https://www.icinga.org/2011/11/03/icinga-vs-nagios-a-developers-comparison/ [icinga.org] And wh

  • Just eastablish a new fork (Score:3)

    by mlwmohawk ( 801821 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:24AM (#46004577)

    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.

  • Nagios - rhymes with (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    adios

  • Plugin developers (Score:3)

    by MouseTheLuckyDog ( 2752443 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:13AM (#46005303)
    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.

  • Holy cow...
    http://assets.nagios.com/datasheets/compare/How_Nagios_Compares_To_Icinga.pdf

    That's a lot of checkmarks! And we all know how much IT managers LOVE those checkmarks (and hate "legal risks" and "high developer turnover". I like how the icinga checkmarks are light gray and the nagios checks are "blazin' blue".

    Lessons learned:
    You know a product is the most awesome of them all when it gets a check mark for every single point compared.

  • From the bugzilla thread (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rk ( 6314 ) on Sunday January 19, 2014 @03:03PM (#46007139) Journal

    "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.

  • Time to research the alternatives. I have suggested Nagios to many people over the years.
  • The article makes a good point. We need to ditch the threaded slashdot UI in favor of news articles being posted to a Bugzilla instance for comment (Or at the very least adding a moderation 'WORKSFORME')

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