Nagios fork warning to Oracle

A fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool called Icinga has officially launched, with the first stable version due October 28.

Matt Asay says this illustrates the health of the open source movement. 

Nagios is a 10 year-old project and those involved with the fork say they include members of its community advisory board and makers of Nagios add-ons.

But there is meaning here for more than Nagios. There is great meaning here for Oracle.

As Oracle prepares to take possession of open source projects like OpenOffice, Java and mySQL, the Nagios fork is a warning that open source code can't be suppressed.

Whatever Nagios' managers did to cause the fork, it can't be nearly as bad as the actions Oracle has been suspected of in its approach to open source competition.

Forks of these larger projects would doubtless move even more quickly, and gain more support from both developers and users, than Icinga, which is used by network managers and not the general user community.

The open source warning to Oracle is clear and was probably put best by Tina Turner, above. You better be good to me.