Open-source working as advertised: ICINGA forks Nagios

Brian Behlendorf of Apache fame once declared the freedom to fork the cardinal rule of open source. He is right, though it's a freedom that is rarely exercised, and even less rarely exercised to good effect.

But on Wednesday a group of developers announced ICINGA, a fork of Nagios, the popular open-source network monitoring tool.

While it's too early to tell whether the fork will succeed, the action already demonstrates both the health and disease of the Nagios community.

Health, because a fork or spin-off of the original project, demonstrates that there is an active community of users and developers that cares enough about the project to ensure it's done "right" (i.e., according to their preferences).

Disease, because clearly the core Nagios developers weren't serving the broad Nagios community well enough. In fact, the ICINGA developers write:

This independent project strives to be more responsive to user requests and faster in software development through the support of a broader developer community.

While there have been few successful forks, ICINGA can learn from those few. Joomla!, for example, has done marvelously well outside the Mambo project, and Openbravo (Disclosure: I am an advisor to Openbravo) and Adempiere have both thrived beyond Compiere. So, it can be done.

I tend to view forks as a sign of strength, because they suggest a broad-based community that cares passionately about the project. With this in mind, I wish both that Nagios and ICINGA projects the best of luck. (And I hope ICINGA will stop capitalizing all of its letters.)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[jeffromiller]

Love your blog - but you seem to be contradicting yourself from your blog post yesterday ("'Community' is an overhyped work in software" ) regarding the use of the term "community" as it relates to open-source...

Yesterday you said: "Much is made of the importance of community in open source, specifically, and in software, generally. But "community" is perhaps the most overhyped word in software, one that doesn't deliver nearly as much value as marketing people would like you to think."

To me, this just seems contradictory with the statements made today - although, I'm sure I'm taking something out of context...Personally, I think the community behind an open-source project is very important to the overall health of the solution. In my mind, the stronger the community, the more relevant the product is to it's intended market.

Just my 2 cents - Thanks,
JM

[pentest]

Matt contradicts himself all the time. It is a disease of businessmen.

[Matt Asay]

No, you're not taking it out of context, but I didn't say that community is useless. I just said it's overhyped. People think they're going to get a lot more mileage than they actually do. I can't tell you the number of times that I've had entrepreneurs come to me and say, "Hey, we open source'd our code to get community, and it never came," or "It came, but didn't do anything." Community has its value, but that value isn't "doing my work for me," which I think is how we too often treat it in open source.

So, to your comment about community mattering, I absolutely agree. i think it makes good projects great. But in this case, the Nagios community effectively decided to make life much harder by duplicating efforts. Smart? Possibly. Joomla certainly has worked. But as I said, ICINGA is a sign that the Nagios community is both healthy and sick, and it's not yet clear what value Nagios or ICINGA will get from this fork. Time will tell....

Thanks for reading! I can tell you that if no one reads my blog, I'd be very sad indeed. And if no one comments and blogs back, I'd be even sadder. So, community matters a lot to me.

[David Gerard]

You forgot the most successful fork of recent times: XFree86 to X.org Server, which promptly took over the entirety of development, most of the active developers and most of the deployments. Even Sun is moving from Xsun to Xorg.

[dmourati]

Matt,

Thanks for the heads up. I've been using Nagios since it was called Netsaint and my proficiency with the software has helped me get hired in my past 4 jobs. At first, I was a bit surprised to hear about a fork. After all, Ethan has always been very responsive and open to patches in my experience. As I read your post, I had in mind a few community leaders who I imagined could have grown frustrated and started the new project. When I went to the ICINGA (I agree, crappy name) site, I was again surprised at the membership of the new crew.

I have never heard of any of these guys.

In any event, I don't see a compelling reason why new users will find out about ICINGA, or why existing users would make the plunge. We'll see.

-D

[bocan2]

If you really know Nagios as well as you say then you must have very low standards. The user interface is the most diabolical piece of junk imaginable. It's ugly, hard to use, and very poorly laid out when you have thousands of services to monitor. The existing database interface causes complete lock-ups and isn't properly maintained. It can't scale without murdering a couple of cpus. If one of your alert scripts freezes it stops monitoring. The list goes on and on. If it wasn't for the fact it's so extensible and when it works - it works - no one would use it. This fork is *exactly* what the doctor ordered.

[watchnerd]

Matt,

Since Nagios is an important part of GroundWork Monitor, we've been asked by a number of people the Icinga (or is it ICINGA) for means to GroundWork users, the community, customers, and the company.

It's still pretty early to know, but we've taken a stab at answering some of the questions that have cropped up here:

http://www.gwos.com/blog/?p=136

Thanks,

David Dennis
Sr. Director of Marketing
GroundWork Open Source

[sharonpr]

Ethan Galstad weighs in: http://community.nagios.org/2009/05/11/nagios-a-fork-in-the-road/