TechTarget points out that Linkerd's original developers coined the term “service mesh” to describe the infrastructure layer for communication between microservices.
But “there has to be some way to connect the businesses built on Linkerd to project funding,” Buoyant CEO William Morgan argues. “If we don't do that, we won't be able to evolve this project and grow it the way we all want it to.”
Such, tech target I will report…
Starting May 21, 2024, companies with more than 50 employees running Linkerd in production will have to pay Buoyant $2,000 per month per Kubernetes cluster to access stable releases of the project. there is.
Source code for the entire project will continue to be available on GitHub, and code for early edge or experimental releases will continue to be committed to open source. However, the Buoyant developers have backported minimal changes to be compatible with existing versions of Linkerd, fixed bugs and created a stable release while ensuring reliability. The additional work will only be available behind a paywall, Morgan said…and he is prepared for some backlash from the community regarding this change. Morgan included the question, “Who should I yell at…?” in the final section of the company's blog post FAQ about the update, in part.
But industry watchers flatly declared the change a departure from open source. “By saying, 'Sorry, we can no longer afford to distribute a production-ready product as free open source code,'” said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “We have removed the open source nature.” “This goes well beyond the typical approach of offering customers the option of using a more basic open source version in production, while offering a managed version of the product with additional premium features for a fee. Volk predicted that open source developers outside of Buoyant would not want to contribute to the project, and to Buoyant's bottom line, unless they received production-ready code in return.
Mr Morgan acknowledged that these may be legitimate concerns and said he was open to finding a way to resolve them with contributors… “It takes work as much as it takes contribution. I don't have a great answer to that, but this is not unique to Buiant or Linkard.
So, according to another report, “Starting in May, if you want to download and run the latest stable version of open source Linkerd, you'll have to rely on Buoyant's commercial distribution.” Discounts available for non-profit organizations), high-volume use cases, and other unique needs. ”)
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. Copyright is held by the author of his Linkerd himself. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
In an interview with TNS, dynamic CEO William Morgan explained that the licensing changes are necessary to make Linkerd run smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging a release also requires a lot of resources, Morgan explained, perhaps even more than maintaining and improving the core software itself. He likened this approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux. Red Hat offers his Fedora as an initial release and maintains its core Linux product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), for commercial clients.
“The work we put into stable releases is primarily testing as well as minimizing changes in subsequent releases, which is a lot of hard work.” We need input from leading experts. Morgan said.
“Well, it's kind of the dark, exclusive side of things.”