7 ms·

Can Open Source Projects Exit Foundations?

53 points by ricecat 1y ago

dedicate 1y ago
maybe once a project, especially one with a strong commercial backer like Synadia, really finds its footing, they might feel they need more direct control to really drive their specific vision forward?
mparnisari 1y ago
My hot take is that CNCF, when you look under the hood, is nothing more than an avenue to promote your project. Once you get people to know about it, it's kinda dangerous to leave it there (other companies may try to change its direction) and I can see why Synadia wanted it back.
- bonzini 1y ago
  They were the majority of the commits so there's no risk that someone would change their project's direction. Ockham's razor tells me that they realized too late that they don't have a viable business model, the money dried up and that's why they wanted to make it proprietary.
eqvinox 1y ago
It's Apache 2.0 licensed, so anyone can "exit" the project from anywhere. "exit" is just a fancy name for fork here — even a proprietary/closed fork — and the usual layer 9 considerations apply, e.g. do they take users & devs with them or not. Or the domain, if there is one.
- bruce511 1y ago
  Yeah, but who owns the name? That's what this is about. Let's say I fork Firefox. I can do that because it's open. I can't call my thing Firefox though (that's that's trademark owned by Mozilla). It turns out, the brand name is actually the thing that matters, not the code. He who owns the name owns the users. In terms of the code, he who owns the contributers owns the code. But it takes a LOT of work to switch people from one brand to another, even if the new brand is the old developers. Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.
  - tgma 1y ago
    Evidently during the donation process CNCF requires them to give them the trademarks so they own it.
    - redeux 1y ago
      That’s true. The problem here was that Synadia never fully transferred the trademark, seemingly in bad faith. When Synadia told the CNCF that it needed to transfer NATS back, they claimed that the CNCF didn’t own the trademark and therefore didn’t own the project.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    > Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior. On the other hand, wikivoyage is more well known than wikitravel. LibreOffice is more well known than OpenOffice. Ultimately though i think this is reasonable. If you go your own separate way you use a new name. If you give your project's name to someone else, that is your own stupid fault.
    - aryonoco 1y ago
      Far to break it to you but OOo install base still dwarfs Libre Office. Nearly all on Windows.
    - dirkc 1y ago
      Are you saying wikitravel has been forked to wikivoyage and that wikivoyage is the new one? I was looking through wikitravel a few weeks ago and felt sad
      - easton 1y ago
        Yes. Wikivoyage is actively being edited (although a lot of it is from wikitravel ~10 years ago)
        1y ago
tgma 1y ago
A better question would be what is the point of CNCF? Why would you voluntarily sign away your trademarks to some random third party without gaining something?
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Maybe an analogy could help. You volunteer at a nonprofit, and come back from work one day to find the office empty, with the phones ringing. You answer the phone. It’s a user asking for support. You help them and conclude the call, then hang up the phone. It immediately rings. It’s the director of the organization. He’s resigning. As he is explaining that he won’t be coming in to work tomorrow, he wishes you good luck before peremptorily ending the call. With a look toward your desk with rising anticipation, the phone once again begins to ring… Do you go in to work the next day? What do you expect to find when you do?
  - fourthark 1y ago
    Well that's a frightening scenario... but how does it relate?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      I think that if you're an unpaid open source developer, then if you no longer want to maintain your project, donating it to something like CNCF might feel like better stewardship than nothing at all, and donating it to "the community" is ambiguous. I can see how one would want their project to do right by its users, but due to bus factors and so on, one person might need to step away indefinitely at little notice. As someone can accidentally find themselves steering an open source project that becomes larger than they ever intended, so too can someone accidentally become their own boss, which was kind of what my analogy was getting at, that it can be thankless work, and that there are likely good reasons that people donate their projects to groups like CNCF or others. A lot of open source software is developed by people employed by large tech companies, so that complicates ownership structures. I can see companies may view projects that are led by nonprofit orgs, trusts, or other durable formations of collaborators as more stable than those led by individuals or small groups, but perhaps they prefer these structures because they are easier to exert control over by those groups seeking to do so, like CNCF may be doing in the case of OP?
atombender 1y ago
With the NATS fiasco, Synadia never achieved any of their stated goals, and ended up in a worse place than before. Why would they do this? Synadia ended up relinquishing their trademarks (which they had already promised to transfer), they gave up taking the project away from CNCF, they gave up their plan to relicense under a BSL license, they alienated a lot of customers, and they got a lot of bad press. The whole thing seemed to lack foresight and planning. The strategy — to blame CNCF for NATS not thriving as a community — was contradictory, since their "rescue plan" involved making it closed source. But I suspect the real reason for failure was that there wasn't really any hope to get the trademarks back; that would have required a legal battle they couldn't afford to pay for. I'm a big fan of NATS as a technology, and I like Synadia as a company. They're doing something a little different than the DataBricks of the world. I completely understand their need to survive financially, and I understand if this pressure has increased after getting VC funding. (They raised $25m a year ago, so I'm guessing the screws started tightening.) However, many other companies have been able to make billions without resorting to a BSL. Unlike Elasticsearch (which also created similar drama and changed their license, then went back to open source after a short while), nobody is threatening Synadia by offering a competitor to their cloud version of NATS. I can only speculate, but I suspect Synadia's existential crisis is self-inflicted. If you look at their product offering, there's simply little reason for any company to pay for a support contract; they made NATS incredibly easy to self-host, and what you get (support and a nice dashboard UI) doesn't stand out as particularly valuable. As someone who used a lot of open source, I'm a little conflicted by this. I want Synadia to succeed as a company. But I think it comes down to this: Either you fully invest in open source and manage to build your business around it, even if that means the business will be a little smaller and never turn into the next Microsoft. Or you don't make any pretenses, and you double down on BSLs and commercial licensing. There isn't a middle ground where you pretend you possess the spirit of open source (which Synadia's communications kept professing) but must also turn to a license hostile to it.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  > I can only speculate, but I suspect Synadia's existential crisis is self-inflicted. If you look at their product offering, there's simply little reason for any company to pay for a support contract; they made NATS incredibly easy to self-host, and what you get (support and a nice dashboard UI) doesn't stand out as particularly valuable. This is just a really sad incentive in place nowadays. If you make something that’s easy to self-host, and open source it, you might end up with a popular project that’s just not financially sustainable. So you see people either overengineering their architecture to the point it’s painful to host, reaching out for a more restrictive licensing, or both (looking at you, Sentry... not judging though). Of course, there’s the open core model as well. There are also mischiefs that pretend their product is open core and enable some features behind a license key, but everything is open source in the repo. (A YC startup, nonetheless! Not calling names because I don’t want to jinx it, but if it was intentional – you have my deepest respect. And I promise I’ll pay you plenty, once I have some money to sustain myself.) So... there might be a spirit of open source somewhere in these “commercial open source startups”, but it’s usually in those that don’t play pretend open source. And in there, money still comes first, of course.
gadders 1y ago
Is this another dispute with hyperscalers using the technology for free?
liveoneggs 1y ago
The purpose of the foundation (to me) is to ensure that this thing will continue to exist five years from now. That a company even thought they could "un-donate" a project is absurd. I'm not sure the CNCF is a very serious place.
MadVikingGod 1y ago
Can a project exit cleanly, probably not. What I'm really disappointed with the CNCF in particular was the lack of support I felt from them. I mean a trade organization is going to do trade organization things like Kubecon, but they could have spent just a fraction of their marking budget on things that directly support projects. What I saw directly from them was the github org, the CLA bot, and a discount ticket to Kubecon. What would have been useful was things like: independent developer stipends, so everything isn't only backed by the large companies in the game; paying for technical writers; independent community managers; dispute arbitration; dedicated hardware for performance profiling; and I'm sure I could think of a few more. While I don't think that anyone in the CNCF is doing the mad scientist laugh trying to make it harder for it's projects, I do think that working with them has change my image of them as a bastion of Open Source.
williamstein 1y ago
This recent long interview with the founder of NATS has some new information and deeper insight into what actually happened: https://changelog.com/podcast/641 https://changelog.com/podcast/641 It ends with the host saying “Rug pulls are not OK” and the NATS founder responding “No pay, not okay.”

53 points by ricecat 1y ago

maybe once a project, especially one with a strong commercial backer like Synadia, really finds its footing, they might feel they need more direct control to really drive their specific vision forward?

mparnisari 1y ago

My hot take is that CNCF, when you look under the hood, is nothing more than an avenue to promote your project. Once you get people to know about it, it's kinda dangerous to leave it there (other companies may try to change its direction) and I can see why Synadia wanted it back.

bonzini 1y ago
They were the majority of the commits so there's no risk that someone would change their project's direction. Ockham's razor tells me that they realized too late that they don't have a viable business model, the money dried up and that's why they wanted to make it proprietary.

eqvinox 1y ago

It's Apache 2.0 licensed, so anyone can "exit" the project from anywhere. "exit" is just a fancy name for fork here — even a proprietary/closed fork — and the usual layer 9 considerations apply, e.g. do they take users & devs with them or not. Or the domain, if there is one.

bruce511 1y ago
Yeah, but who owns the name? That's what this is about. Let's say I fork Firefox. I can do that because it's open. I can't call my thing Firefox though (that's that's trademark owned by Mozilla). It turns out, the brand name is actually the thing that matters, not the code. He who owns the name owns the users. In terms of the code, he who owns the contributers owns the code. But it takes a LOT of work to switch people from one brand to another, even if the new brand is the old developers. Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.
- tgma 1y ago
  Evidently during the donation process CNCF requires them to give them the trademarks so they own it.
  - redeux 1y ago
    That’s true. The problem here was that Synadia never fully transferred the trademark, seemingly in bad faith. When Synadia told the CNCF that it needed to transfer NATS back, they claimed that the CNCF didn’t own the trademark and therefore didn’t own the project.
- bawolff 1y ago
  > Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior. On the other hand, wikivoyage is more well known than wikitravel. LibreOffice is more well known than OpenOffice. Ultimately though i think this is reasonable. If you go your own separate way you use a new name. If you give your project's name to someone else, that is your own stupid fault.
  - aryonoco 1y ago
    Far to break it to you but OOo install base still dwarfs Libre Office. Nearly all on Windows.
  - dirkc 1y ago
    Are you saying wikitravel has been forked to wikivoyage and that wikivoyage is the new one? I was looking through wikitravel a few weeks ago and felt sad
    - easton 1y ago
      Yes. Wikivoyage is actively being edited (although a lot of it is from wikitravel ~10 years ago)
      - 1y ago

tgma 1y ago

A better question would be what is the point of CNCF? Why would you voluntarily sign away your trademarks to some random third party without gaining something?

aspenmayer 1y ago
Maybe an analogy could help. You volunteer at a nonprofit, and come back from work one day to find the office empty, with the phones ringing. You answer the phone. It’s a user asking for support. You help them and conclude the call, then hang up the phone. It immediately rings. It’s the director of the organization. He’s resigning. As he is explaining that he won’t be coming in to work tomorrow, he wishes you good luck before peremptorily ending the call. With a look toward your desk with rising anticipation, the phone once again begins to ring… Do you go in to work the next day? What do you expect to find when you do?
- fourthark 1y ago
  Well that's a frightening scenario... but how does it relate?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    I think that if you're an unpaid open source developer, then if you no longer want to maintain your project, donating it to something like CNCF might feel like better stewardship than nothing at all, and donating it to "the community" is ambiguous. I can see how one would want their project to do right by its users, but due to bus factors and so on, one person might need to step away indefinitely at little notice. As someone can accidentally find themselves steering an open source project that becomes larger than they ever intended, so too can someone accidentally become their own boss, which was kind of what my analogy was getting at, that it can be thankless work, and that there are likely good reasons that people donate their projects to groups like CNCF or others. A lot of open source software is developed by people employed by large tech companies, so that complicates ownership structures. I can see companies may view projects that are led by nonprofit orgs, trusts, or other durable formations of collaborators as more stable than those led by individuals or small groups, but perhaps they prefer these structures because they are easier to exert control over by those groups seeking to do so, like CNCF may be doing in the case of OP?

atombender 1y ago

With the NATS fiasco, Synadia never achieved any of their stated goals, and ended up in a worse place than before. Why would they do this? Synadia ended up relinquishing their trademarks (which they had already promised to transfer), they gave up taking the project away from CNCF, they gave up their plan to relicense under a BSL license, they alienated a lot of customers, and they got a lot of bad press. The whole thing seemed to lack foresight and planning. The strategy — to blame CNCF for NATS not thriving as a community — was contradictory, since their "rescue plan" involved making it closed source. But I suspect the real reason for failure was that there wasn't really any hope to get the trademarks back; that would have required a legal battle they couldn't afford to pay for. I'm a big fan of NATS as a technology, and I like Synadia as a company. They're doing something a little different than the DataBricks of the world. I completely understand their need to survive financially, and I understand if this pressure has increased after getting VC funding. (They raised $25m a year ago, so I'm guessing the screws started tightening.) However, many other companies have been able to make billions without resorting to a BSL. Unlike Elasticsearch (which also created similar drama and changed their license, then went back to open source after a short while), nobody is threatening Synadia by offering a competitor to their cloud version of NATS. I can only speculate, but I suspect Synadia's existential crisis is self-inflicted. If you look at their product offering, there's simply little reason for any company to pay for a support contract; they made NATS incredibly easy to self-host, and what you get (support and a nice dashboard UI) doesn't stand out as particularly valuable. As someone who used a lot of open source, I'm a little conflicted by this. I want Synadia to succeed as a company. But I think it comes down to this: Either you fully invest in open source and manage to build your business around it, even if that means the business will be a little smaller and never turn into the next Microsoft. Or you don't make any pretenses, and you double down on BSLs and commercial licensing. There isn't a middle ground where you pretend you possess the spirit of open source (which Synadia's communications kept professing) but must also turn to a license hostile to it.

notpushkin 1y ago
> I can only speculate, but I suspect Synadia's existential crisis is self-inflicted. If you look at their product offering, there's simply little reason for any company to pay for a support contract; they made NATS incredibly easy to self-host, and what you get (support and a nice dashboard UI) doesn't stand out as particularly valuable. This is just a really sad incentive in place nowadays. If you make something that’s easy to self-host, and open source it, you might end up with a popular project that’s just not financially sustainable. So you see people either overengineering their architecture to the point it’s painful to host, reaching out for a more restrictive licensing, or both (looking at you, Sentry... not judging though). Of course, there’s the open core model as well. There are also mischiefs that pretend their product is open core and enable some features behind a license key, but everything is open source in the repo. (A YC startup, nonetheless! Not calling names because I don’t want to jinx it, but if it was intentional – you have my deepest respect. And I promise I’ll pay you plenty, once I have some money to sustain myself.) So... there might be a spirit of open source somewhere in these “commercial open source startups”, but it’s usually in those that don’t play pretend open source. And in there, money still comes first, of course.

gadders 1y ago

Is this another dispute with hyperscalers using the technology for free?

liveoneggs 1y ago

The purpose of the foundation (to me) is to ensure that this thing will continue to exist five years from now. That a company even thought they could "un-donate" a project is absurd. I'm not sure the CNCF is a very serious place.

MadVikingGod 1y ago

Can a project exit cleanly, probably not. What I'm really disappointed with the CNCF in particular was the lack of support I felt from them. I mean a trade organization is going to do trade organization things like Kubecon, but they could have spent just a fraction of their marking budget on things that directly support projects. What I saw directly from them was the github org, the CLA bot, and a discount ticket to Kubecon. What would have been useful was things like: independent developer stipends, so everything isn't only backed by the large companies in the game; paying for technical writers; independent community managers; dispute arbitration; dedicated hardware for performance profiling; and I'm sure I could think of a few more. While I don't think that anyone in the CNCF is doing the mad scientist laugh trying to make it harder for it's projects, I do think that working with them has change my image of them as a bastion of Open Source.

williamstein 1y ago

This recent long interview with the founder of NATS has some new information and deeper insight into what actually happened: https://changelog.com/podcast/641 https://changelog.com/podcast/641 It ends with the host saying “Rug pulls are not OK” and the NATS founder responding “No pay, not okay.”