Opensource projects play a key role in modern software development. They are widely used in building commercial solutions: we all know and actively adopt Kubernetes, PosgtreSQL, Kafka, Cassandra and many other really great products. But opensource comes with a risk - a risk that one day a vendor will change the license to a commercial one (remember a story around Elasticsearch 😡?).
If a project become commercial, what can be done further:
✏️ Start paying for the product
✏️ Migrate to an opensource or home-grown alternative
✏️ Freeze the version and provide critical fixes and security patches on your own
✏️ Fork the project and start contributing to it
The actual decision cost will vary depending on the product importance and complexity. But anyway it will be extra costs and efforts.
That’s why, when choosing an open source software, I recommend to pay attention to the following:
✏️ Community: check activity in github repo, response time to issues, release frequency, number of real contributors
✏️ Foundation: if a project belongs to the Linux Foundation or CNCF the risk of a license change is very low
That's why I found a story around NATS (https://nats.io/) really interesting. Seven years ago, the NATS project was donated by Synadia to the CNCF. Since then, community has grown and has ~700 contributors. Of course, Synadia continues to play an important role in NATS development and roadmap.
But in April, Synadia officially requested to take the project back with the plans to change license to Business Source License. From CNCF blog:
Synadia’s legal counsel demanded in writing that CNCF hand over “full control of the nats.io domain name and the nats-io GitHub repository within two weeks.
This is a first attempt to take a full project back and exit from a foundation I've seen. If it succeeds, it will create a dangerous precedent in the industry and kill the trust to the opensource foundations. Actually they exist to prevent such cases and provide protection from a vendor lock.
The good news are that on May 1st CNCF defended its rights for NATS and reached an agreement with Synadia to keep the project within CNCF under Apache 2.0. In that story CNCF demonstrated the ability to protect its projects, so belonging to the CNCF is still a good indicator to choose opensource projects for your needs.
#news #technologies
