I think we should look at this story as an opportunity to look at open source and free software, and evaluate where we are.

The success has been, in a way, beyond expectation: Linux is everywhere and the world is using Github to publish and contribute to open source code.

Another way to look at it is: The Cloud and interest of big players have corrupted the idea of what free software is.

From an architect point of view what the CNCF is was always obvious: it serves the interests of businesses separated in membership tiers who provide either "a cloud", software that run in the cloud or big time users of those software.

This is not new, there were others before like The Open Group who develop "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." They were the certifying body for the UNIX trademark, and things like X Window or TOGAF.

The deal of the CNCF is clear: if you are a startup and you want to be in the club, you put your code under our umbrella, you pay the fees, surrender to our politics and we put you in our landscape.

It seems something went wrong between Synadia and those interests. NATS could never graduate but now they are finding out that "You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave".

Synadia were told they can't graduate because there is no real community and now that they want to pull out the CNCF is dragging them through the mud because "they are killing the community".

So I would love to see the CNCF, as a defender of open source and the community, send the same letter and take legal action against some of its other members for not publishing their core software under an approved open source license, including: Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Boeing, Google, Huawei, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc.

That would be fun.

> NATS could never graduate

Regarding the lack of graduation, I would invite people to read the full comment by user raghu999 on the nats-server discussion[1].

I will quote two paragraphs from it here, but I really encourage people to read the whole thing:

    During that lengthy graduation process, the CNCF TOC explicitly and repeatedly raised concerns about the lack of core server maintainer diversity and the risks of single-vendor (Synadia) dominance. Your [Synadia] team's responses at the time consistently deflected these concerns, arguing that client diversity was sufficient, the server was stable/uninteresting for external contributors, and that demanding core diversity was misguided.

    Now, the narrative has flipped entirely. The very fact that Synadia employees contributed the vast majority (~97%) of the server code – the exact scenario the TOC warned about – is being presented as the reason Synadia must now implement a restrictive BUSL license to recoup investment. This is a stunning reversal. It appears Synadia actively resisted diversifying core control when it was a prerequisite for graduation, only to later weaponize the resulting lack of external contribution as justification for this license change.

[1] https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/issues/6832#issuecomm...

I evaluated a range of options and selected NATS for a project in Jan 2025, then spent every waking moment developing and launching this project over the last four months. Absolutely central to my choice of NATS was that it is a CNCF project. You see, I was badly burned a few years ago but what happened with RethinkDB, which I used for a similar purpose!

I read substantial chunks of the NATS source code and contributed many small PR’s and suggestions back. Sometimes the devs were very welcoming and sometimes not. In fact, a few weeks ago I started this repo to document some contributions frustrations: https://github.com/williamstein/nats-bugs

Anyway this rug pull is extremely disappointing to me. It is especially sad because NATS is excellent technology, and no matter what their just shot themselves in the foot, and I had really really had hope for them to grow a lot in the next few years.