op5 About Open Source

What does op5 mean by Open Source?

With open source, we mean that the source code, which constitutes our products, is made available to our customers, who can utilize, read and modify the code. This assures the user that the program is doing what it should and is adjustable to fit the customers needs. Such modifications are commonly made by the original author, who may choose to make those adjustments a part of the official version. Find more information about the projects we build our products upon.

GPL (copyright)

In GNU General Public License 2.0, it says (translated freely) that it is prohibited to withhold source codes from the user, if the source code is a development of the source code protected by GPL. One is not allowed to further spread the developed software or the original. However, there is nothing that states that one has to make one’s seperated and stand alone add ons available to the general public. (Read more about GPL>>)

op5's products are based on a number of different GPL licensed softwares. We develop functionality, which is normally added to one or more open source code programs. The code usually involves integrated functions, between several independent programs, in order to obtain added functionality and/or user-friendliness. Our source code is always available to our customers.
op5's programmers are active members of several open source communities, and a lot of the work being done is submitted back to the communities

What Open Source does op5 utilize?

We utilize open source code projects, in our systems, from a wide variety of tested products with a proven good track record, to alpha releases of softwares which we review ourselves, in order to verify that the code is secure and stable.

As a basis for our appliance, we utilize CentOS (www.centos.org). CentOS can be viewed as RedHat Enterprise Linux, except that it is for free, or, as CentOS say it themselves. “CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor".

How does op5 contribute back to the Open Source communities?

op5 have close relationships with the projects used and contribute back to the communities primarily by giving back developed code, bug fixing, participating in mailing lists and by sponsoring some of the projects financially. All code developed, modified or added in to existing OSS based projects are always submitted back to the project. op5 also finance, host and arrange Nordic Nagios Meet, a user and developer conference for Nagios, Cacti and RRDtool.

op5 Network Management Suite includes three products:

• op5 Monitor
• op5 Statistics
• op5 LogServer

• Nagios, http://www.nagios.org/
• NSClient++, http://trac.nakednuns.org/nscp/
• smstools, http://smstools.meinemullemaus.de/
• nagiosgraph, http://nagiosgraph.wiki.sourceforge.net/
• NRPE, http://www.nagios.org/
• NSCA, http://www.nagios.org/
• Cacti, http://www.cacti.net/
• Cactid, http://www.cacti.net/
• RRDtool, http://www.rrdtool.org/
• Apache, http://httpd.apache.org/
• MySQL, http://www.mysql.org/
• PostgreeSQL http://www.postgresql.org/
• webinject, http://www.webinject.org/
• hypergraph, http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/
• php, http://www.php.net/
• openldap, http://www.openldap.org/
• jscalendar, http://dynarch.com/mishoo/
• perl, http://www.perl.org/
• nagiosplugins, http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/
• CentOS, http://www.centos.org/