There is a new controversy in the Linkerd community with reports that many Linkerd users will now need to pay to run the software, and it will only be available under a proprietary license. I do not think this is entirely correct. Here are my thoughts on this topic.
Linkerd is a CNCF project, where Buoyant is the main project sponsor, employing the majority of its contributors.
Linkerd Project made an announcement, and Buyoant posted an extended version of the announcement, which, among other things, announced a “new model for stable releases,” and now it would be in the hands of the “vendor community,” which at this point means Buoyant.
As such, while Linkerd remains open source, it will become a “Fedora Style” project, intended more for development rather than for mission-critical production use.
This, of course, creates more room for the success of Buoyant commercial products based on Linkerd Project — Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd — this does not, however, change anything about Linkerd project being open source.
If there is enough business in the Linkerd community, hopefully, there will be more companies building “enterprise grade” products around Linkerd, some of them possibly open source.
Where I have questions, though, is whether it is indeed the result of the Open Governance Linkerd committed to, to decide it is not in the interest of the project to have stable builds. Is it a question of undue governance influence of a single corporation or a lack of community resources?
There is nothing wrong with Buoyant picking where to spend resources of their staff, especially not spending resources to create competition to their own commercial offering. I would see a problem, though, if Buoyant, one way or another, prevents other members of the community from creating official project stable builds. This is where some words from non-Buoyant-affiliated Linkerd project members or CNCF would help.
One more thing to note: I was glad to see the Linkerd trademark is owned by Linux Foundation (parent organization for CNCF), which hopefully ensures the Linkerd project remains open source.
