I see you guys decided to make RHEL clone users pay for using Icinga.
I suggest you look for other sources of revenue. Asking for a subscription in the middle of a support cycle is just a form of racketeering and makes the open source world look bad.
I don’t know if the Icinga team is reading this, but allow me to share some thoughts as an IT professional (member of the LPI documentation team, teacher at our local university, 100 % GNU/Linux since Slackware 7.1).
Making Rocky Linux (or any other RHEL clone) users pay for accessing the Icinga repositories is indeed a dick move, and doubly so. First of all, you don’t make this kind of decision in the middle of a release cycle, because doing this just pulls the rug from under our feet. Well OK, I can still choose to pay, but if I do this for a product that was initially advertised as free, it’s downright racketeering. Let’s call a spade a spade.
And it’s also discriminating. Because users of other distributions like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE can still use the package repositories freely (as in free beer). So how is it that Rocky Linux users suddenly have to pay for a subscription? Is that Open Source Sociology 101?
Yes, I’m really pissed off at the perspective of having to find a free alternative to Icinga, of having to write new course material about supervision, etc.
I know it’s bad and I also voiced my problems with the approach.
On the other hand it’s kind of par for the course as RHEL did the same to Cent OS and thus the RHEL clone ecosystem.
I also don’t appreciate teachers focusing on commercial distributions and its colones and would prefer if community distributions like Debian would get more academical focus and support with tutorials and course material.
But I agree with you that Rocky and Alma deserve the same free binaries as OpenSuse.
BTW free software doesn’t mean gratis binaries. So maybe there isn’t a requirement for Icinga to provide them and it would be nice if the distribution packagers would provide them.
Rocky Linuy and Alma Linux are not commercial distributions. They’re free (as in free beer) software. My teaching is based on Rocky Linux because it has 10 years of support per release, whereas Debian has not even half of that.
I know free software doesn’t mean gratis binaries. But deciding to cut binary support off right in the middle of a release cycle is a big “fuck you” to Icinga users running RHEL clones.
I got the message, dear Icinga developers. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already spent the last two days looking for a replacement for Icinga. CheckMK, Prometheus, LibreNMS and others look promising. And no thanks for all the extra work.
Rocky and Alma Linux are unofficial free clones of a commercial distribution, that is quite hostile against them, so aren’t really independent - at least content wise.
Why is the 10 year support so important for an Icinga2 installation? Debian upgrades worked like a charm in my case, while the switch from Cent OS to Alama Linux was a pain. I also think that a configuration system based approach, like with Ansible, makes the individual server less important and easy to replace and is thus the way to go.
True and I was also pissed but I was already in the process of ordering a support contract, wich I delayed by a couple of months because of this. BTW, I think there is a free developer licence for the Icinga package repository, that you could be eligible for as you create training material - did you contact Icinga GmbH about this? @theFeu can you help?
Nothing compares. I use LibreNMS to handle the SNMP stuff and use the Linuxfabrik’s checks to get the aggregate of health and alarms per host into Icinga. Not sure how well the service part works but it looked clunky.
To me Icinga2 is like the Lego of monitoring, a framework to build your own, how you want it with, except some core limitations like the 4 states, the performance data format and the host 1:n services object model.
but since this was always meant for centos the updates are no longer available since centos7 and centos8 are EOL.
I used google translate to read your post and though I was able to understand the basic meaning, sometimes the translation to german was a bit off, that is not your fault, but by writing it in french you restrict the content to a smaller group. maybe consider a rewrite in english.
Icinga is an opensource software published under the GPL. this does not mean that that packages are available for free.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
“GNU General Public License, Version 2 - GNU-Projekt - Free Software Foundation”
I’ve been running Icinga on all my servers (mix of Rocky Linux 8.x and 9.x) for the last five years or so.
There were never any official free icinga2 packages for EL9. How did you do that?
The paid subscription topic is from November 2022. It is not a popular decision, but also not a recent one.
And the last part:
if you trust someone completely different to build packages for you, you can look at this post:
I also built some packages myself and it costs time, lots of time, and as we IT-Professionals know time = money. Every packages provided by Icinga needs a build pipeline, maintenance and testing and so on. So it is their choice for which platform the packages are available.
As it is you also decide which content is available for free on your blog and which content is behind the “university enrolment paywall”
Hello there,
sorry for the late reply I’ve been out cold sick for the past few weeks.
Most of the things I wanted to say have been added here already.
First I’d like to add to this:
It’s true that we offer access to developers, and we were also thinking of offering this to educational institutions.
Have you tried to get in contact with us?
Our reasoning behind asking for money for certain packages is pretty simple: We are employing a bunch of developers full time to offer a (imho) pretty great software for free.
We also want to pay those developers a good salary.
We can’t sustain that on support alone, so we tried to think of a way to earn money that seemed the most ethical to us, which turned out to be monetising the packages for enterprise OS.
Of course there is no perfect way to do this without hurting some people, like you, who use Rocky or Alma.
I’m sorry for that.
Nevertheless we stand by our decision, as it enables us to pay our developers and not having to let anyone go, despite the current economic situation.
Please do contact us so we can have a chat about how you can continue using Icinga for education, as that is something we definitely want to support.
