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title: Did you fork?
parent: FAQ
---
# Did you fork the Nagios Plugins?
Short answer: No. They forked us.
Long answer:
Initially, there was a Nagios Plugins project. Today, there is both a [Nagios
Plugins][nagios-plugins] project and a [Monitoring Plugins][monitoring-plugins]
project. The answer to the question of who forked whom probably isn't
immediately obvious, especially for those who weren't involved in the mess.
It'll depend on how exactly you define a "fork", and it may not be all that
important anyway.
However, because you asked, here's our view on the happenings.
* Originally, there was a Nagios Plugins project that was maintained by us;
i.e., a [team][team] of volunteers not affiliated with [Nagios
Enterprises][enterprises].
* In 2011, we transferred the `nagios-plugins.org` domain to Nagios
Enterprises on their request. This transfer was coupled with an
[agreement][agreement] that we would continue to run the project
independently.
* Early in 2014, Nagios Enterprises copied most of our web site and changed
the DNS records to point to their web space instead, which then served a
slightly modified[^changed-site] version of our site, including the tarballs
we created. This was done without prior notice. Presumably, their
[reasoning][reasoning] for this move was that we [mentioned Icinga and
Shinken][mentioning] on our home page.
So today, there are two projects:
* One driven by the company that controls the domain.
* The other one driven by the team that lost its domain, but that did the
actual maintenance work in the past, and that continues to maintain the same
project with the same infrastructure (e.g., the GitHub
[repositories][repositories] and [trackers][trackers], the [mailing
lists][support], and the [automated test builds][tests]) under the new name.
Thus, in our view, they clearly forked us, not vice versa. We just see two
differences to most other forks, which make this case less obvious:
* The project that has been forked didn't own its domain name.
* The project that performed the fork did so without showing any previous
development activities.
[^changed-site]: In the meantime, they changed the contents and design of
parts of their web site.
[nagios-plugins]: http://www.nagios-plugins.org/ "Nagios Plugins"
[monitoring-plugins]: index.html "Monitoring Plugins"
[team]: team.html "Monitoring Plugins Development Team"
[enterprises]: http://www.nagios.com/about/company "Nagios Enterprises"
[agreement]: news/domain-transfer.html "Domain Transfer Agreement"
[reasoning]: archive/devel/2014-January/009420.html "Reasoning of Nagios Enterprises"
[mentioning]: archive/devel/2014-January/009428.html "Response to Nagios Enterprises"
[repositories]: https://github.com/monitoring-plugins/repositories "GitHub Repositories"
[trackers]: https://github.com/monitoring-plugins/monitoring-plugins/issues "GitHub Issue Tracker"
[support]: support.html#mailing-lists "Mailing Lists"
[tests]: tests.html "Test Results"
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