NATS relationship with the CNCF

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Synadia plans to change the NATS license to BUSL (Business Source License).

This Hacker News discussion has some more details:

And there are some documents available:

NATS, as an OSS project, has not gained a lot of community contributions (97% of the development done by Synadia). The CEO of Synadia is by far the largest contributor to the NATS server, and the next 7 contributors are all Synadia employees. (There are a number of other repos.)

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This document presents a little different view from the CNCF:

It is hard to know what the following license change will mean for projects like Simple IoT.

  1. Transition to the Business Source License (BSL): Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server. The BSL will provide a balance between open-source accessibility and commercial sustainability. Under this license, the source code will remain open. Still, specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license. Details on the particular terms and conditions of the BSL will be publicly available and transparent.

The following comment on Hacker News is interesting:

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 thing seems to be in their “landscape”. They are basically selling brand promotion.

Then you probably have a lot of politics dominated by their Platinium members: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Boeing, IBM, Huawei, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.

CNCF doesn’t work for the community, they work for their (Platinium) members. Synadia works for its investors and they decided to change course (regrettably).

The code under Apache License 2.0 is available on the internet, if it is valuable some people will fork and maintain it. But it is not gonna be the CNCF and its staff.

The following are the CNCF Platinum members, which costs $350,000:

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The interests of the CNCF are likely dominated by the largest tech companies. Synadia’s primary concern is likely competitors to Synadia Cloud. Hopefully, small commercial users who run a NATS Server will be exempt, but we’ll see.

NATS is likely heading for a fork.

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Synadia’s response:

This illustrates an important point – smaller organizations doing OSS face different commercial challenges than large tech companies.

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There is also a discussion here:

One comment:

We had no intention of relicensing the NATS code base, and we explicitly said that during our conversations with the CNCF. Since the CNCF is apparently experiencing issues with other projects and re-licensing, Chris asked me. I was very clear that it would be server only and that their would always be an AP2 version of the server, and clients would continue to be AP2.

I do feel strongly that projects like NATS, that are funded and grown by a single company, do not fit well into the current CNCF’s view of projects.

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Additional discussions:

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A blog post by a former NATS maintainer:

To support their decision to prevent NATS from leaving, CNCF used the argument that NATS has a breadth of contributions across companies, even citing “over 700 other organizations”. CNCF dismissed this same argument made from the NATS maintainers, preventing graduation. This was wild to read; I’m still shaking my head.

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Redis is now adding AGPL to its license mix:

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I attended an AMA (ask me anything) call with Synadia today. A few notes:

  • Consumption may be free, but production never is.
  • BSL (one of the license options being considered) code would be transferred to AP2 in 2 years or less.
  • Not targeting small companies.
  • Main issue is large companies who self-host large deployments who are not willing to pay anything. (sounds kind of like the recent WordPress drama)
  • Synadia is financially stable, they are not going anywhere.
  • The concern is more toward the future as Synadia has a lot of ideas for future features that require significant investment.

One person from a large company made the following comment:

Hi Synadia team and NATS community. Really glad to see the positive resolution with CNCF.

I want to acknowledge I was critical during the recent discussions. For the Synadia team, please know that for many of us, that criticism stemmed primarily from concerns about the communication around the situation, not from a view that Synadia itself is ‘bad.’ I hope those strong perspectives, including my own, have ultimately helped trigger these important new conversations about the broader ecosystem.

On that note, I wanted to share that at ____________, we’re strongly considering providing feedback to the CNCF board via our OSPO. We encourage other end-user companies to do the same. This situation has highlighted a critical need for the community to advocate for clearer pathways within foundations like CNCF to ensure that hyperscalers and cloud providers don’t take unfair advantage of innovative projects, especially those heavily backed by startups.

As Derek has pointed out, without this, we risk discouraging the very startups that drive so much innovation. While there are many perspectives on what happened, it’s clear the community coming together can help shape better support systems. Thanks for the open discussion today."

At this point, I plan to continue to use NATS and promote its use in projects. For my typical use case (smaller industrial companies in vertical markets), NATs is a great technology, and the future innovations seem more geared to multi-cloud and hyper-scale stuff. Where possible, I think it makes sense to use Synadia cloud (hosted NATS) for critical applications, as the pricing is reasonable.