Derek Collison on NATS, Synadia, and the CNCF Controversy

Origins of NATS

• 💡 NATS began as a weekend project in 2010 at VMware, designed for Cloud Foundry as a high-performance, reliable messaging system.
• 🚀 It was built on the principle of doing a few things exceptionally well, prioritizing simplicity and backward compatibility.
• 🔑 The initial protocol, designed quickly, remains compatible with modern NATS servers today.

NATS's Unique Approach to Connectivity

• 🎯 NATS aims for location independence in distributed systems, abstracting away the complexities of IP-based addressing.
• ⚡ It supports both push and pull communication patterns, enabling efficient real-time updates without constant polling.
• 🧠 This approach contrasts with traditional one-to-one request-reply patterns, offering powerful primitives for large-scale distributed systems.

Evolution and Business Development

• 🚀 Originally written in Ruby, NATS was rewritten in Go in 2017 by Synadia to address performance needs and enable static binary deployments.
• 📈 As customer demands scaled to billions of messages, challenges with Go's IO and concurrency began to emerge, prompting consideration of new languages like Zig and Mojo.
• 💡 Synadia was founded in late 2017, betting that edge computing would dominate interaction models and necessitate a new approach to distributed systems beyond traditional cloud paradigms.

The CNCF Relationship and Controversy

• 🤝 Derek Collison was a founding governing board member of the CNCF, involved from its inception.
• ⚠️ Tensions arose as NATS, an incubating project, faced challenges in graduating due to criteria like contributor diversity, leading Synadia to consider leaving the CNCF.
• ⚖️ Synadia explored relicensing options, including the Business Source License (BSL), to signal commitment to both open source and customers, ensuring eventual conversion to Apache 2.0.
• 📢 The CNCF's public blog post announcing NATS's potential departure and Synadia's relicensing considerations surprised Synadia, leading to a public narrative that conflated licensing and project fit issues.

Navigating Open Source Business Models

• 💰 A core concern for Synadia was that large companies were using NATS in critical production systems without commercial agreements, impacting sustainability.
• 🧩 The discussion highlights the challenge of balancing open-source principles with the need for a viable business model, especially when a single company drives significant development.
• 🤝 Synadia decided against a BSL fork, opting instead to expand commercial offerings through composition and integrations, while committing to continue developing the Apache 2.0 licensed NATS server.
• 🗣️ The controversy underscores the need for clearer agreements and communication within the open-source ecosystem regarding project contributions, licensing, and the sustainability of commercially-backed open-source projects.