Groundwork Support Forum

[agalue]

Hello,

I have doubts about the use and re-distribution of groundwork foundation.

I'm part of the developer team of a monitoring application.

We developed an application to monitor certain network devices in many ways in order to generate historical reports. Now some of our customers are interested to receive notifications for threshold conditions, service checks, snmp traps, and so on. We know that Nagios is a very tested opensource tool that could be used as an "Event Manager". My application was developed on Java, and use some copyrighted modules that cannot be distributed under GPL license.

We are interested to use groundwork foundation to:

1. Get data from Nagios using Foundation Persistance Layer (from our java classes)
2. Configure Nagios through the Foundation API (from our java classes)
3. Develop some adapters to process thersholds and snmp traps primarily

My question is:

The use of groundwork foundation in this manner could be a problem with GPL license, considering that we cannot distribute our application with this license?

If I use Groundwork foundation (no changes to it) : does that mean that I must distribute our software under the GPL ? If so : any legal way around this ?

Thanks in advance

[tdondich]

The GPL states that you can re-distribute the software in commercial projects; however, you must include the license and notice for Foundation with the product.

As for making changes to Foundation with your project, you must publish your changes, making them freely available and covered under the GPLv2 license as well.

BTW: You cannot make changes to the nagios configuration using Foundation. It's a way to get data out of nagios, not in.

Taylor
_________________
Project Maintainer for Guava, Status Viewer and Fruity at Groundwork Open Source.

[rruttimann]

Here some answers to your questions:
Get data from Nagios using Foundation Persistance Layer (from our java classes)

This is what the Nagios Feeders are doing. Get the Nagios Event and State data and feed it into foundation. At this point you don't have to develop anything new.

2. Configure Nagios through the Foundation API (from our java classes)
Foundation is independent of Nagios. Foundation is a data integration framework independent of any tools. Whatever data you like to integrate (Nagios, SNMP, SYSLOG, JMX,..) a feeder and adapter is required. Please read the overview document: http://gwfoundation.sourceforge.net/Feeding-and-Normalize-Data-for-Foundation-1.1.pdf
that describes the process.

If you like to store configuration data you would need to add Meta Data in form of properties to Hosts, Devices and ServiceStatus. These values would be accessible through the API. If you have some suggestions please use the mailing list or the Forum to discuss it. I'm pretty sure other people have similar ideas/requirements.

3. Develop some adapters to process thersholds and snmp traps primarily
Best approach would be the following: Store threseholds as property for a ServiceCheck. The adapter would then check the incoming value with the threshold and set the MonitorStatus.

Regarding the GPL: You can redistribute the binary as long as you include the GPL license. If you write custom adapters or feeders this is your property and doesn't fall under the GPL. However we welcome any contributions to the project like adapters/feeders/mete data to enhance data store which are useful to other people as well.

Open Source is all about community!

Let me know if you have more question
Roger