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Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

cncf.io

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Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#11

Post by sunshine-o »

nchmy wrote: post #8

ugh... Yet another rug pull of beloved software that so many people have based their projects - and, in this case, entire architecture - on... Hopefully CNCF will prevail - most notably in creating a viable OSS team around it, as happened with Redis -> Valkey etc...

I am confused because:

- Valkey [0] is a project of the Linux Foundation

- CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation

- The CNCF landscape includes Redis [1] but not Valkey

Do someone understand their logic?

- [0] https://valkey.io/

- [1] https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=app-definition-and-developme...

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#13

Post by rcombatwombat »

d4mr wrote: post #7

I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NAT…

Two points:

From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company".

Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia (https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will.

Putting yourself in their shoes, are your surprised they want to take it back from CNCF?

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#14

Post by abhisek »

killme2008 wrote: post #12

This is something that has never happened before. When you need open source for promotion and fundraising, you embrace open source; when you want to make money, you kick open source to the curb. That's what we see.

There is a need for a funding base especially when a project grows beyond a single person and needs a team to be maintained.

Either this “somehow” comes from the community or it comes from the investors. If it’s the latter then eventually the pull is more towards revenue.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#15

Post by jhot »

I only use NATS as part of my home automation architecture but I have found it very nice to use and would have been happy to use it at work if we weren't so entrenched in AWS proprietary services.

I wonder if they are hoping to become more of a platform and leverage NEX to sell edge functions like cloudflare, bunny.net, etc are doing?

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#16

Post by d4mr »

rcombatwombat wrote: post #13
d4mr wrote: post #7

I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NAT…

Two points: From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company". Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia ( https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168 ). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will. Putting yourself i…

not surprised, I agree the decision makes sense for them. It's just an unfortunate situation for the community. We don't know what the BUSL license would entail, and an open-source fork is unlikely to receive a lot of contribution (if historical contribution data is anything to judge by)

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#17

Post by nchmy »

rcombatwombat wrote: post #13
d4mr wrote: post #7

I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NAT…

Two points: From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company". Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia ( https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168 ). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will. Putting yourself i…

at the same time, in the graduation application, they seemed to strongly argue that they didnt even want outside contributors - saying that having community-developed client libraries and a synadia-developed core server was both proof of broad adoption and reason for future stability.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#18

Post by [deleted] »

rcombatwombat wrote: post #13
d4mr wrote: post #7

I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NAT…

Two points: From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company". Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia ( https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168 ). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will. Putting yourself i…

[deleted]

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#19

Post by sunshine-o »

jen20 wrote: post #9
imglorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point!

On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero. The vast majority of the work here is being done by a very small group of people - likely those paid by the commercial sponsor (a random sample of the top few suggest that well over half of those top…

> On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.

This is something I always do manually and it is annoying. The number of contributors we see on the front page of a project on Github is misleading and can easily be faked by a malicious actor because a user who corrected a typo 5 years ago is counted as a contributor.

Github should really improve that.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#20

Post by arccy »

sunshine-o wrote: post #10
d4mr wrote: post #7

I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NAT…

Thank you for pointing to those sources. While I regret Synadia decision to change the license I have to admit just reading the CNCF reponse was very very misleading. Ok Synadia says they were not happy with the CNCF collaboration. In the end they were paying for this membership and their services. So I went and looked at the various member benefits and it doesn't sound really attracting to me [0] The most valuable t…

The branding comes from the graduation process. If a project can navigate its way through graduation, then you can be reasonably sure it will continue to stay alive for a few more years even if a particular company pulls out.

NATS has basically failed as a community developed project, what's left is whether it's allowed to rug pull the brand.

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