Nagios trademark rights dispute ended

The dispute between the 'father' of open source monitoring application Nagios and German company NETWAYS GmbH has been resolved. Ethan Galstad, Nagios' inventor and founder of Nagios service provider Nagios Enterprises, had accused NETWAYS of infringing the Nagios trademark. He contacted NETWAYS on several occasions in 2006 and demanded that a number of domains using Nagios in the domain name and the Nagios trademark, registered in Germany by NETWAYS MD Julian Hein, be transferred to him. Galstad claimed that all trademark rights relating to Nagios belonged to him.

In a statement, Hein writes that there was no intention to harm Nagios, the Nagios community or Nagios Enterprises. He states that some of the facts cited by Ethan Galstad are true, but that the implied intention is false and that he has already agreed to transfer the domains in question and rights to the Nagios trademark in Germany to Nagios Enterprises. Hein told The H's associates at heise open that Galstad has now accepted that the dispute has been resolved.

NETWAYS GmbH is an open source service provider which offers Nagios consulting and support. For several years the company has been the organiser of a Nagios conference, now renamed the Open Source Monitoring Conference. It is one of the driving forces behind Nagios fork Icinga. In response to dissatisfaction over the pace of development, Icinga was forked from the Nagios core – which is maintained by just a small team led by Ethan Galstad – in 2009. The majority of the Nagios developer community is involved in writing plug-ins for the monitoring application.

See also:

• Interview: Ethan Galstad - The Nagios future, a feature from The H.

(trk)