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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

#41

Post by atombender »

robertlagrant wrote: post #39
atombender wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sustainability of open source doesn't seem to come down to whether the product is open source or not.

As an example, Elastic was a $10B company in 2021 — the year they went dual license — with revenue of around $500-600m. They showed that you can build a huge business on something that's given away for free. I don't know anything about Synadia's financials. It's possible they're successful, but simply want more. It's possible they've not been able to build a sustainable business on NATS. Their commercial offering is basically support plus a closed-source control plane, which isn't exactly a big carrot when the alternative is $0.

I also wonder if there's any VC pressure happening here that could explain the sudden shift. Synadia raised $25m in 2024, and it may be that, one year later, the investors just aren't seeing the progress they were expecting.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#42

Post by robertlagrant »

atombender wrote: post #41
robertlagrant wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sustainability of open source doesn't seem to come down to whether the product is open source or not. As an example, Elastic was a $10B company in 2021 — the year they went dual license — with revenue of around $500-600m. They showed that you can build a huge business on something that's given away for free. I don't know anything about Synadia's financials. It's possible they're successful, but simply want more.…

Maybe - I wasn't making a point about open source particularly. But you can also have a few unusual examples in times of zero interest rates and they don't necessarily make useful reference points. Only the people in charge will know the whole story and how it relates to their company.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#43

Post by kcexn »

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…

I have always had the impression that the CNCF was founded as a kind of demilitarized zone for large companies to collaborate on big projects.

Having governance and contributions all recorded in the public domain, and the software licensed so that it is free means that the big firms limit the risk of IP infringement and they can control the size of their financial investment to be proportional to their financial benefit.

In Kubernetes related projects for instance, I've seen sensible bug reports asking for features that have been rejected not because of a lack of sponsors, or lack of resources, or lack of expertise, but because it doesn't fit into the projects goals or roadmap. Responses like that never made me feel that these projects were particularly ”open".

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#44

Post by kcexn »

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…

The thing is, Synadia has made 97% of the contributions. So they essentially own the copyright to the entire project and the CNCF hasn't helped them to build a community of developers and software support.

There's a balance to be struck here, but, given that there are not really any users of NATS that are contributing back to the community. It seems very reasonable to me that NATS should be able to relicense their software, and it won't affect any of their commercial users. Free users can be transitioned to a trial license, and the impact from the transition will be minimal.

Re: Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source

#45

Post by kcexn »

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.

Synadia was clearly open to being supported by community contributions. But since no-one who used NATS wanted to maintain NATS, a decision has to be made about how to support the project in the long-term.
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