Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to visit my humble blog. I have added a note to the original post above to make sure that any new readers check out the comments, and I hope to take a look at this more in depth myself.

It seems that there was at some point in time a relationship between the two products which you now say is ended. This may be the cause of the confusion from the thread from last year.

The goal of my post was to understand what was going on, and you have moved that process along nicely,

Thanks for allowing my response to be posted – very cool

Your right, all of our livelihoods depend on our respective companies success and as such care should be taken when we make libelous comments.

As to your questions raised here are the facts:

1. FireScope’s core CMDB code was developed by Brigham Young University (BYU) – code we purchased the from BYU – No Zabbix

2. Our FireGrid UI, DataNow Portlet have been contributed to the open source community. Organically developed – no Zabbix

3. Alexei and his team were paid ten of thousands of dollars to develop commercial monitoring functionality that we wanted in our BSM product. Unfortunately, even after the efforts of all involved it proved not to be a viable option for FireScope to use the Zabbix developed code that we paid for. As such we removed all code that we contracted Zabbix to develop from our product. We wish no ill will towards Zabbix and as a fellow contributor to open source we wish them well.

4. As to why Zabbix says the things they say – I cannot answer that question only the person making those statements can.

Thanks for raising the issue and allowing FireScope to give their side of the story.

Good luck and continued success

You state that Firescope uses no Zabbix code even though “we paid Zabbix for commercial code”. This is news to me, although I saw some mention of this the Zabbix thread. Can you elaborate?

From your statements I am under the impression that I could download your current products and not find a single bit of Zabbix code. Is this correct?

As for “baseless” – my accusations are far from it. There does seem to be circumstantial evidence to support the Zabbix claim. Can you respond to them? Did Firescope at one time use Zabbix code? Why do you think Zabbix is making these claims?

Also, slander involves speech – I believe the word you are looking for is libel. My statements are far from libelous, although I expect you would find them unpleasant or even distasteful.

Your final comment about family livelihoods seems to imply that the people who work on Zabbix don’t have the same commitments. The fact that some of us chose to work on open source software versus closed source software doesn’t make us any less hard working or any less concerned with “fortunes”.

I welcome you to use this forum to clear the record, and I will gladly and prominently write that my statements were wrong if you will demonstrate that to me. You have to agree that, at least at one time, Firescope and Zabbix were eerily similar, enough to raise the question.

Sincerely

An Open Source Contributing Company
FIRESCOPE

Steven V. Cotton
CEO