[Full Disclosure Up Front: I am one of the Icinga Core Developers]

Give it a rest already Ethan. You miscalculated the response this would get and your attempts to sow confusion to distract people is just getting silly and making you look bad.

The Monitoring Plugins Team started to migrate towards using a new domain name because you and your company have a very *long* history of pulling stunts like this very one. Not to mention that since many other projects now use those very same plugins, having Nagios in the name is actually a bit misleading and can actually cause confusion.

If you think about it, the Monitoring Plugins Team were working on trying to do the very thing you and your company want and demand of everyone with every breath that you guys take, which is to not use the Nagios name... and now you want to turn around and point at that as the reason why you hijacked the domain out from under them and stole their web content while at the same time trying to shame them for it?! Puhlease!! Don't insult our intelligence.

Perhaps you've been in the commercial world so long that you've forgotten, but there's no such thing as competitors in the open source community. At least not in the way you would define it. Sure there are other projects that do similar things and perhaps even the same things in the case of forks, but we all seek the same goal, which is to scratch the technical itches we have using Free Software and maybe interact with some fun and smart people a little bit while we are at it.

So yes, the website you hijacked said that the plugins work with Icinga and others. Leaving aside the fact that there are no competitors when it comes to open Source for a moment, that is hardly promoting them; that is just simple bullet point disclosure of what they work with. If anything, mentioning as many of the monitoring solutions that use the plugins as possible is a benefit to the monitoring plugins project as it shows that it can be used with a diverse range of monitoring solutions, not just one. If that's your excuse for what you did, it's very weak at best.

Look Ethan, we all know you need to put food on the table. We all do. Many of us also have a deep respect for what you contributed to the Open Source Community way back in the day and none of us will discredit you for that or ever say that you don't have a personal right to cash in commercially as you have gone on to do. That's just great and congratulations, we wish you continued success.

That said, each and every one of us have a personal right as individuals to be treated with respect too. Shitting on the good names of other people who have contributed a lot to the Open Source Community is highly disrespectful and abhorrent behavior. While you may be respected for your past contributions, the more you continue on this line of attack (especially the personal ones) the fewer people there will be who can respect you as a person. So if you want to make blog posts talking about acting with honor and having high ethical standards, go ahead, but you might want to put in some work on those qualities yourself first sir... a lot of work.

Just because you got burned by a Trademark doesn't mean you have to continue to take it out on us for all eternity. And you certainly don't need to stoop to the level of engaging in vindictive personal attacks like you have done each and every time you have asserted yours.

Yes, Michael Friedrich originally opened the bug, and yes he is the lead core developer for Icinga. So what? That doesn't make the point he has brought up any less valid. In fact, I'm not at all surprised that he was so fast at picking up on this as he is firmly committed to Open Source network monitoring and he spends most if not all his time working on or with it in some fashion. If there is anyone in the world who has his ear closest to the ground to spot such things in the area of network monitoring, it would be him. The community is all the better for it.

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As to the other comments here, no one wants to deal with the added headaches this has caused. Unfortunately, this is solely Nagios Enterprises doing and as they have shown historically by their actions, they are not as friendly towards the Open Source Community as they'd like people to think. If you don't like it, you might want to start seeking out a monitoring solution that doesn't play these games or throw out such a constant stream of vitriol.

The fact of the matter is, Nagios Enterprises is a commercially driven company (speaking of ulterior motives) therefore it's in their interest to try to squash alternatives so they can be the only game in town. Without changes being made to the upstream packaging to head it off, what is to stop their next plugins update from refusing to play nice with other monitoring solutions altogether? That's not to say that they will stoop that low, but they are certainly dancing close enough with the bottom as it is.

I'll gladly take Ethan's word that they have a team of developers banging away at the code as we speak. Their first order of business is probably doing what they do with the Nagios core patches the Icinga Team sends them... doing the uncool thing of stripping out every mention of anyone else in the code so no one but them gets credit for the work.

More power to them though; the existence of this new team changes nothing regarding this. The nagios-plugins package that people have installed on their systems right now was developed by another team and the domain has just been hijacked out from under them. As others have said, the upstream should point to the old team not the one that did a hostile takeover.

As to the FUD-laden mention of there being a possibility of backlash, that's pretty doubtful, but it's something that Nagios Enterprises should have considered before doing what they did. One can only hope that if there is any, it is directed at those responsible and is so decisive and overwhelming for them so they think twice next time they are thinking about not playing nice.

I'm not well versed in the fine details of packaging, so I'll defer to Sam and his wisdom in that area. I have every confidence that he can find an equitable way to ensure that the monitoring plugins development team isn't allowed to be quietly strong armed and squashed by a commercial interest while letting the three people who still trust Nagios Enterprises after all of this to select a new package for their plugins going forward.