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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

#31

Post by sixdimensional »

imglorp wrote: post #4
sunshine-o wrote: post #3

Very interesting. NATS is really a great platform but I was always had my reservations regarding its viability as an open source project. The end of the era of abundance in tech is really having an impact on open source. The problem here is while one would obviously side with the CNCF taking action and fighting for the trademark, it doesn't really matter at the end. Either there are people willing to maintain the cod…

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.

I would wonder if paying for a legal fight to recapture the trademark is even worth it.

Couldn't Synadia just fork what they want to and rebrand for a commercial new product, and go forward from there?

If they wanted to backport or keep contributing to the open source project they could, or leave some parts open source going forward, while forking only the server for example, to do that.

Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#32

Post by carlwgeorge »

sixdimensional wrote: post #31
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.

I would wonder if paying for a legal fight to recapture the trademark is even worth it. Couldn't Synadia just fork what they want to and rebrand for a commercial new product, and go forward from there? If they wanted to backport or keep contributing to the open source project they could, or leave some parts open source going forward, while forking only the server for example, to do that. Kind of like how RHEL used to…

> Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).

RHEL contributes to CentOS now more than ever.

CentOS started outside of Red Hat (2003), and didn't get any direct contributions from Red Hat. It built from RHEL sources, which is an indirect contribution that didn't involve any Red Hat employees. Later Red Hat hired most of the CentOS maintainers (2014), and contributed to CentOS by paying their salaries and providing hardware resources, but that was where the contributions ended. This was the status quo until 2021, which is when RHEL maintainers were onboarded to CentOS, drastically increasing the number of people working on CentOS.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#33

Post by atombender »

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…

If you read the letter from Synadia to the CNCF committee [1], the license change and taking control back to commercialize NATS is the entire reason for the change.

It's not because they're unhappy about the CNCF or that they're not getting their money's worth; that is at best a red herring. If they genuinely thought the CNCF's governance was lacking, there are ways for them to take steps to improve the situation without a license change.

But that's not what they're doing. They cannot continue at the CNCF if NATS is turned into a proprietary product.

All the lofty words about a strong commitment to open source has no merit now. If they were committed to open source, they would stay with the CNCF.

I wish companies had the courage to be forthright: Synadia gave something away for free, they now regret that nobody is paying what they think they deserve, and they want the money. It's as simple as that. Those goals — at least in terms of the chosen strategy — are not compatible with open source, and they might as well admit it.

[1] https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#35

Post by sixdimensional »

carlwgeorge wrote: post #32
sixdimensional wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wonder if paying for a legal fight to recapture the trademark is even worth it. Couldn't Synadia just fork what they want to and rebrand for a commercial new product, and go forward from there? If they wanted to backport or keep contributing to the open source project they could, or leave some parts open source going forward, while forking only the server for example, to do that. Kind of like how RHEL used to…

> Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too). RHEL contributes to CentOS now more than ever. CentOS started outside of Red Hat (2003), and didn't get any direct contributions from Red Hat. It built from RHEL sources, which is an indirect contribution that didn't involve any Red Hat employees. Later Red Hat hired most of the CentO…

I was not up to speed, there seemed to be a period of time when CentOS support was dwindling and it even looked like the project might no longer have upstream support.

Regardless of the complex history of CentOS, RHEL, etc it seems like the original thrust of CentOS lives on rebranded as RockyLinux for example.. and CentOS stream serves Redhat's needs/purposes.

I think forking still is a valid method to resolving challenges for NATS here.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#36

Post by nacs »

derekcollison wrote: post #28

Here is our official response. We also plan to have a public AMA early next week for anyone interested. https://www.synadia.com/blog/synadia-response-to-cncf

As someone that recently started trial-running a NATS cluster, this move by Synadia that I just learned of has made sure that I won't continue on with NATS.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#37

Post by maxloh »

arccy wrote: post #21
sunshine-o wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They actually explicitly allow adding closed source projects to the landscape.

https://github.com/cncf/landscape?tab=readme-ov-file#new-ent...

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#38

Post by [deleted] »

thayne wrote: post #24
sunshine-o wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

[deleted]

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#39

Post by robertlagrant »

atombender wrote: post #30
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…

On the other hand, if they're pouring money into a project that doesn't make them enough money to make it worthwhile, that does seem unsustainable. Maybe NATS should get less popular but become an option in EKS/AKS/GKE that Synadia runs.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#40

Post by __turbobrew__ »

derekcollison wrote: post #28

Here is our official response. We also plan to have a public AMA early next week for anyone interested. https://www.synadia.com/blog/synadia-response-to-cncf

> Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company

Seems like a failed CNCF project. I guess synadia can fork nats and build their own, but the CNCF nats would basically lose all the contributors so what is the point of keeping the trademark?

A good warning for those looking at CNCF projects to audit where the commits are coming from. I passed up using mayastor/OpenEBS, and one of the main reasons was that almost 100% of the commits were from a single for-profit company who could just bail on the project at any time. I ended up going with Rook which has a much healthier spread of commiters.

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