Nagios offers a great example of why open source needs to protect its brand
Just because it is open source, don’t think for a second that there is not tremendous value in the brand name and copyright for open source software. The source code is available and the software may be free in most instances, but open source developers still need to protect their brand and IP from damage and others using their hard work and good name for their own gains. A great example of this is the recent story involving Nagios and their 5 year long battle to reclaim their brand and good name from a German company, Netways.
For those not familiar with Nagios, it is a very widely used open source network and IT infrastructure monitoring tool. There is a whole list of tasks that can be accomplished with Nagios. I know several commercial products that actually use Nagios at their heart. The project has been around for over 10 years. It was started by Ethan Galstad but quickly grew into a very popular “must have” enterprise open source tool. In 1997, Galstad started a commercial entity, Nagios Enterprises, LLC. It offered services and development around Nagios. In 2009, Nagios Enterprises released its first commercial products around Nagios and renamed the open source version Nagios Core. So it would appear that Nagios and Galstad are following an open core model. Nagios has won lots of awards and recognition and is really a top open source app. If you are not familiar with it, go check it out.
But, back to our story. It seems that about 5 years a company called Netways came out with what they call Incinga, essentially a fork of Nagios. The Netways people said that Incinga was forked to “help improve Nagios”. Sounds like a case of “with friends like these, who needs enemies”. According to the blog post that Galstad posted, how Netways and Incinga people helped was to register a bunch of domains like nagioswiki.org, nagiosforge.org, and nagiosexchange.org. The traffic from those nagios related sites was then directed to Incinga. In the meantime Netways and Incinga unleashed a barrage of disparaging content around Nagios. Complaining about bugs and functionality is one thing, but the Netways folks appeared to really go out of their way to hit Nagios’ commercial entity as proof that it was no longer open source.
In an ironic twist the Incinga project which is GPL licensed it appears was almost exclusively supported by Netways, while Nagios enjoyed broad support from a wide and deep community. So in a case of “will the real open source monitoring tool please stand up”, the battle went back and forth for a number of years finally ending up as these type often do, with the lawyers involved.
But that is when Galstad appealed to the Nagios community. In a show of support, it would seem that the pressure applied to Netways by the open source community has won the day. Netways has agreed to give up the domains in question and stop trading off of the Nagios name. So another happy ending thanks to the open source community exerting itself. Of course it remains to be seen if Netways will still disparage the open core model of Nagios, but there is nothing illegal about that.
In the meantime, open source developers should be aware that there is value in your brand. Letting others trade and profit on it not only can hurt your own interests, but don’t serve the community either.
