Comment 19 for bug 1273484

I'm one of the maintainers of the original Nagios Plugins project that
has now been forced to change its name. So, I'm obviously biased---just
like Andy Brist, but from the other side of the fence.

I guess the answer to the question of who forked whom isn't immediately
obvious, especially if you're not involved in the mess. It'll depend on
how exactly you define a "fork", and it may not be all that relevant for
the decision on how to proceed with the RedHat/Fedora packaging anyway.

Let me just add my view on the current situation. I'd invite Andy (or
anyone else) to let us know if he thinks I got any of my facts wrong.
Hopefully that'll help RedHat/Fedora with making an informed decision on
which of the two upstreams to use for packaging, or whether to package
both.

Over the past several years, the Nagios Plugins project was maintained
by a team of volunteers not affiliated with Nagios Enterprises.
However, back in 2011, we transferred the "nagios-plugins.org" domain to
Nagios Enterprises on their request. This transfer was coupled with an
agreement that the actual maintainers would continue to run the project
independently.¹ However, a few days ago, Nagios Enterprises copied most
of our web site and changed the DNS records to point to their web space
instead, which now serves a slightly modified version of our site
including the tarballs we created. This was done without prior notice.
From what I understand², their reasoning for this move was that they
weren't happy with us mentioning competing monitoring products on our
home page (please correct me if I'm wrong, Andy).³

So, we now have two upstreams:

One driven by the team that lost its domain, but that did the actual
maintenance work in the past, and that will continue to maintain the
same project with the same infrastructure (GitHub repos/trackers,
mailing lists, automated test builds, and so on) under the new name.

The other one is driven by a team that seems to be "new" indeed:
Personally I don't recall *any* contributions of *any* of the new team
members (in fact I didn't even know their names before reading them on
the new Nagios Plugins web site). Or can you point me to just a single
patch or mailing list posting of any of the members of the new team,
Andy? Don't get me wrong: You guys may well be into Nagios Plugins
development. But for outsiders like me, the fact that you didn't show
any public activity in this area so far might add a bit of uncertainty
regarding the future of your project.

In short, I see two differences to a "prototypical" fork:

1) The project that has been forked doesn't own the domain name.
2) The project that performed the fork did so without showing any previous
   development activities.

¹ https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/news/domain-transfer.html
² https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009420.html
³ https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009428.html