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 NATS.io project has failed to thrive as a CNCF project, with essentially all
growth of the project to date arising from Synadia’s efforts and at Synadia’s expense. It is for this reason that
Synadia requests to end its relationship with the Foundation and receive full control of the nats.io domain
name and Github repository within two weeks.
From Synadia's exit proposal:
> We propose that NATS.io exit from the CNCF Foundation effective immediately... Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server... specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license.
From CNCF's response:
> Let's be clear: this is not a typical license change or fork. It's an attempt to "take back" a mature, community-driven open source project and convert it into a proprietary product—after years of growth and collaboration under open governance and CNCF's stewardship.
From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company".
Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia (https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will.
Putting yourself in their shoes, are your surprised they want to take it back from CNCF?
at the same time, in the graduation application, they seemed to strongly argue that they didnt even want outside contributors - saying that having community-developed client libraries and a synadia-developed core server was both proof of broad adoption and reason for future stability.
not surprised, I agree the decision makes sense for them.
It's just an unfortunate situation for the community. We don't know what the BUSL license would entail, and an open-source fork is unlikely to receive a lot of contribution (if historical contribution data is anything to judge by)
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.
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.
> 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 project to be open source anymore. If a company can change its mind and claw back a project, that undermines the purpose of the CNCF.
Also, membership in CNCF is distinct from having a project contributed to CNCF. As far as I know, there is no requirement that you be a member of the CNCF to submit a project to the organization. And I don't think you have to contribute a project in order to be get membership.
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.
The branding comes from the graduation process. If a project can navigate its way through graduation, then you can be reasonably sure it will continue to stay alive for a few more years even if a particular company pulls out.
NATS has basically failed as a community developed project, what's left is whether it's allowed to rug pull the brand.
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".
summarising some context for folks;
From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter:
> As should be clear, the NATS.io project has failed to thrive as a CNCF project, with essentially all growth of the project to date arising from Synadia’s efforts and at Synadia’s expense. It is for this reason that Synadia requests to end its relationship with the Foundation and receive full control of the nats.io domain name and Github repository within two weeks.
From Synadia's exit proposal:
> We propose that NATS.io exit from the CNCF Foundation effective immediately... Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server... specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license.
From CNCF's response:
> Let's be clear: this is not a typical license change or fork. It's an attempt to "take back" a mature, community-driven open source project and convert it into a proprietary product—after years of growth and collaboration under open governance and CNCF's stewardship.
Primary sources:
- Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...
- Synadia's Exit Proposal: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...
- CNCF's Response: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04/24/protecting-nats-and-the-...