Comment by thayne
8 months ago
> 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.