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.