The Nagios project has been forked. This will probably come as a surprise to a lot of people but I wasn’t overly shocked. To be honest I am surprised it took this long to happen. Nagios has always been a one man show - Ethan Galstad tightly controls its development and lifecycle. Whilst licensed as open source the project (outside of the Nagios Plugins) was largely architected, coded and run by Ethan with only a small number of user- contributed patches being applied.

This great article -Last In - First Out: Your Application is a Rotting Old Shack, Now What? - tells some serious truths about how badly a lot of application development is conducted. Though perhaps a better description of the failed processes would be “application management” or “application lifecycle”. The Phase 1 of this “application lifecycle” generally works like this: Company identifies need for Application Company decides internal team can’t develop Application and they decide to buy off-the-shelf Application.

The beta1 release of Puppet 0.25.0 has been released! This is a big woot! This represents a mountain of work for Luke and a number of contributors to Puppet (including me! :P). It’s been about 18-24 months in the making since Luke first started tossing ideas around and cutting code. We’re not fully there yet. This is a beta release after all but it’s well on the way and with sufficient testing we should get a release candidate out within the month I hope.