The Nagios fork - responses

In a previous post I mentioned that the Nagios project had grown a fork. I also mentioned that there might be dirty deeds linked to the rationale of the fork. Ethan Galstad, Nagios’ developer, has responded to events with a post on the Nagios blog. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of a response and it left me a little underwhelmed and a little confused. On one hand, Galstad welcomes the fork as a sign that the community is alive and well. On the other hand, he then links it to some potential changes in the way Nagios is developed - basically more openness and communications. I was left feeling a little like “well a fork shouldn’t have made you notice this - the communtity has been telling you this for years”. He also posed the question, one I have seen quite a bit during the evolution of forks, “But… if you wanted to be different/new things/forks/change why didn’t you ask?” To my mind they did ask - as did other members of the community - when they and others sought a more open and collaborative approach to Nagios development. Perhaps, albeit a little presumptive, the answer to that question is “they didn’t ask because they didn’t think they’d get an answer”. The ICINGA project, however, hasn’t really launched yet - no code has been released. So we’’ll have to wait and see how the new project evolves from here and whether changes occur to the parent project as a result of the fork.