James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Steve Walsh pointed me at something interesting this morning while I was waiting to see if I was going to crash and burn at Senator Kate Lundys Public Sphere event.

Apparantly a group of "community nagios developers" has banded together and decided that nagios isn't advancing as fast as they would like and so they're going to fork it.

On their "Why A Fork?" page they have this to say:

"In contrast, the core of this system – the Nagios software itself- is maintained by a single developer in the United States and hence is developed at a slower pace. The Nagios community has previously attempted to clear this bottleneck with suggestions to broaden the developer base. Long awaited improvements such as the regular integration of community patches, the connection to databases or the web interface were hoped to be accelerated. Unfortunately, these attempts came to little success and effective community commitment has gradually deflated.

Over the past 6 months, the situation has escalated with Nagios Enterprises LLC requesting several long term community projects to state that they are not officially connected to Nagios. In a few cases the companies were requested to change their open source project names or transfer their domains over. This combination of reduced visible software development and disproportionate actions against long time Nagios supporters has irritated many active community members."

In essence they seem to be saying that the guy behind Nagios IS the development bottleneck and so in order to keep Nagios moving along they have to take it out of his hands.

I don't know the ins and outs of this, but Nagios is a project that is used pretty extensively in data centres around the world, so it's going to be interesting to see the effect this has.