Reasons to not release in house GPL'd code (was Future of Nagios)

[William Leibzon]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Steven D. Morrey <smorrey at ldschurch.org>wrote:

> When I worked as an enterprise IT consultant, I noticed that lots of GPL'd
> projects that were created for in house use would never be released to the
> public.
> Below are the top 5 reasons given by these organizations, most of these
> decisions came from either corporate legal or some MBA way up the chain in
> middle management.


Hi all

I have to strongly agree with what Steven said. I've seen all the same too.
Best I could do (wich only worked in a few cases) is try to convince to
release code as my own taking full responsibility but many are unwilling
since after all they paid money to have it developed. Very egoistic
enterprise morality unfortunately, everyone for him/her/itself and don't do
things for the public good eventhough these enterprises are themselve using
program developed and made available for free.

BTW, I did not want originally to comment on that entire thread in regards
to Icingal and see how things go but my opinion is what's happening is
related to egoism and personal/corporate/commercial interests too. I did not
like it when Ethan started changing nagios from purely open-source project
to a company with commercial interests. But its his project and he really
done A LOT for the public in the last 10 years so he's entitled to proper
compensation and project does need a more stable base. I did not like
Netways even more because even though they were releasing good things I
always perceived strong commercial and corporate interests and certain greed
- I even had a running with Netways myself when I modifed nagiosgrapher and
offered to submit changes to them (see http://william.leibzon.org/nagios/)
if they opened project more but they were unwilling and I saw that their
interests are not inline with a real open-source attitude; and I was
actually reluctant to post my code to nagiosexchange for long time because I
perceived commercial interests there too, just look how prominently they
display that its "powered by Netways" where as usually
repositories/directories like this display sponsor logo at the bottom or
talk about sponsors at the about page (and notice also that nagiosgrapher is
still the only top-rated project).  I really wish we had repository like
this organized by independent party (or preferably non-profit entity) doing
it entirely for the benefit of users and getting money to run it through
donations directly by users or by companies.

At the same time it appears to be true that Ethan is keeping too much
control over nagios base, but simply does not have time to develop it in the
way he did before so projects that have been on agenda for 3+ years are not
getting done. In fact the project is really too big for him to do it alone
if we want enterprise-centric features. So I can understand frustration that
people here have shown but "split" in the way it has been announced is
simply not the right approach. What the right approach should have been is
announcement of new project that will incorporate nagios as a base and at
the same time provide some new features and interfaces (i.e. monitoring
system like groundwork base on nagios but with further work on top of it).
We have several such projects that are doing well. But instead this was
announced as a fork so rather then build user base based on their release
and new features, they are trying to take away existing user base. This
appears to be a battle of personal and corporate interests more then
anything else and its hurting nagios community which in my view is really
represented by developers on this list and by users on nagios-users list.

To Ethan - I think the code should really be opened more then public or you
should hire additional people who will help development and incorporate
changes and discuss anything that is not incorporated. If this is not done,
it looks like you're too busy for nagios and its not entirely clear that
what you're busy with is good for the benefit of the nagios community.

And I really really hope people will come to their senses that they should
be helping community and public and that means working together and helping
each other and public as a whole rather then acting on their own interests.
This "fork" will hurt nagios and help competition projects rather then help
too make it popular and better.

Ok. done with my opinion. No flames please, we've had enough.

Frustrated with what's going with one of my favorite open-source network
tools,

William
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