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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

#21

Post by arccy »

sunshine-o wrote: post #11
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...

nobody bothered to submit it https://github.com/cncf/landscape/pulls

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#24

Post by thayne »

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…

> Ok Synadia says they were not happy with the CNCF collaboration. In the end they were paying for this membership and their services.

So they can leave, and make their own fork of the project.

When they joined the CNCF, they agreed to give control of the project to the CNCF, and a big reason for that is to give users of the project assurance that the license won't change if the vendor decides it doesn't want the project to be open source anymore. If a company can change its mind and claw back a project, that undermines the purpose of the CNCF.

Also, membership in CNCF is distinct from having a project contributed to CNCF. As far as I know, there is no requirement that you be a member of the CNCF to submit a project to the organization. And I don't think you have to contribute a project in order to be get membership.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#25

Post by eluusive »

The NATS project originally came out of CloudFoundry, and gnatsd later out of Apcera. I worked for Apcera while we were maintaining gnatsd. Docker and Kubernetes basically put that company out of business -- the founder went and started Synadia which was focused on NATS instead of container orchestration.

I think nats is a great technology for a number of use cases. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find the resources to support and maintain open source software while paying developer salaries.

Derek put a ton of work, effort, and money into NATS.

It's a sad story to me; I don't know what the answer is to these sorts of "tragedy of the commons" type issues are.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#26

Post by askbjoernhansen »

mprime1 wrote: post #5
imglorp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Die, how? It's a vibrant project with 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go Yes, the legal fight may end up permitting the clawback of the trademark, in which case the project will carry on under a different name and repo. But that's not death, that's fork. The source is out of the bag under Apache 2.0 and there's no putting that back in the bottle.

> 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go That's the NATS Go _client_. The server project is https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server 17k stars, 1.5k forks, 160 contributors

Look at the contribution history, basically all active contributors work for Synadia: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/graphs/contributors

That's not a healthy / functioning open source community. Less than 30 people have made more than 10 commits; most of the 160 were "drive by" who fixed a single small thing.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#27

Post by tylertreat »

eluusive wrote: post #25

The NATS project originally came out of CloudFoundry, and gnatsd later out of Apcera. I worked for Apcera while we were maintaining gnatsd. Docker and Kubernetes basically put that company out of business -- the founder went and started Synadia which was focused on NATS instead of container orchestration. I think nats is a great technology for a number of use cases. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find the reso…

I worked (briefly) at Apcera as well and on the NATS team as a core contributor on the project. I sympathize because it is really difficult to build a viable business around OSS. But the move to contribute it to CNCF, which put it on a stage that it simply never would have had without the foundation, and now trying to withdraw it because it is still a fledgling project is just not a good look.

The irony is how would this have played out if it _did_ turn into a thriving project under CNCF? In that scenario, the NATS brand would have substantially more value and equity. That would have made a relicensing even more impactful, made it even more difficult to claw back from CNCF, and even more controversial. Because NATS remains relatively niche, I suspect the thinking is that not enough people will really care for it to matter, but if that's the case, why not just make a proprietary fork under a new name?

I don't know how this situation doesn't result in a fork. Either the BSL will be a fork or the OSS will be a fork. But because nearly all of the contributors are Synadia employees, I don't know what this will mean for the longevity of the project.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#29

Post by rogerthis »

I'm not against this kind of move (Synadia's) by itself, but it seems too early. I've been following NATS for some time, and undeservedly, it hasn't taken off. I could find only two books; documentation is clean but I think it could be improved; blog posts, tutorials, videos are few and sparse in time; community tools are nil (from what I could find). A non-open source license is going to restrict adoption even more.

I recommended it to my clients every time it looked like a solution to the problem, but never been able to convince, due to the lack of community or big cloud sponsorship/offerings.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#30

Post by atombender »

rogerthis wrote: post #29

I'm not against this kind of move (Synadia's) by itself, but it seems too early. I've been following NATS for some time, and undeservedly, it hasn't taken off. I could find only two books; documentation is clean but I think it could be improved; blog posts, tutorials, videos are few and sparse in time; community tools are nil (from what I could find). A non-open source license is going to restrict adoption even more.…

I think NATS is definitely popular. What is your standard for "taken off", though?

One thing I've learned in my career is that the field is broken into many smaller "bubbles". There is lots of software that flies under the radar if you're not inside the right bubble. Blogs and books aren't necessarily an accurate measurement of how healthy an open source project is.

Sure, there may be less noise around NATS than, say, Kafka. But there could be other explanations for that. From my perspective NATS is one of those well-engineered workhorse technologies that get the job without fuss or hype or (until now) drama. Some tools are just quiet because people are getting stuff done with it. I'm willing to bet it's got decent adoption in Fortune 500 companies.

I don't have any hard numbers. But if you wander into the NATS community Slack, for example (which isn't easy to find, admittedly!), you'll find that it's quite active compared to many other open source projects. Looking at Docker Hub, NATS has very healthy stats, beating prominent projects like Cassandra in terms of absolute pulls, and not far from Kafka.

One thing is certain, Synadia is not going to make NATS more popular by moving to a proprietary license.

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