I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative.
summarising some context for folks;
From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter:
> As should be clear, the NATS.io project has failed to thrive as a CNCF project, with essentially all growth of the project to date arising from Synadia’s efforts and at Synadia’s expense. It is for this reason that Synadia requests to end its relationship with the Foundation and receive full control of the nats.io domain name and Github repository within two weeks.
From Synadia's exit proposal:
> We propose that NATS.io exit from the CNCF Foundation effective immediately... Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server... specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license.
From CNCF's response:
> Let's be clear: this is not a typical license change or fork. It's an attempt to "take back" a mature, community-driven open source project and convert it into a proprietary product—after years of growth and collaboration under open governance and CNCF's stewardship.
Primary sources:
- Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...
- Synadia's Exit Proposal: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...
- CNCF's Response: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04/24/protecting-nats-and-the-...
Here is our official response. We also plan to have a public AMA early next week for anyone interested.
This is something that has never happened before. When you need open source for promotion and fundraising, you embrace open source; when you want to make money, you kick open source to the curb. That's what we see.
Very interesting.
NATS is really a great platform but I was always had my reservations regarding its viability as an open source project.
The end of the era of abundance in tech is really having an impact on open source.
The problem here is while one would obviously side with the CNCF taking action and fighting for the trademark, it doesn't really matter at the end. Either there are people willing to maintain the code or it will die as an open source project.
I only use NATS as part of my home automation architecture but I have found it very nice to use and would have been happy to use it at work if we weren't so entrenched in AWS proprietary services.
I wonder if they are hoping to become more of a platform and leverage NEX to sell edge functions like cloudflare, bunny.net, etc are doing?
I'm not against this kind of move (Synadia's) by itself, but it seems too early. I've been following NATS for some time, and undeservedly, it hasn't taken off. I could find only two books; documentation is clean but I think it could be improved; blog posts, tutorials, videos are few and sparse in time; community tools are nil (from what I could find). A non-open source license is going to restrict adoption even more.
I recommended it to my clients every time it looked like a solution to the problem, but never been able to convince, due to the lack of community or big cloud sponsorship/offerings.
ugh... Yet another rug pull of beloved software that so many people have based their projects - and, in this case, entire architecture - on... Hopefully CNCF will prevail - most notably in creating a viable OSS team around it, as happened with Redis -> Valkey etc...
See also the issue: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/issues/6832 Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250425154144/https://github.co...
The NATS project originally came out of CloudFoundry, and gnatsd later out of Apcera. I worked for Apcera while we were maintaining gnatsd. Docker and Kubernetes basically put that company out of business -- the founder went and started Synadia which was focused on NATS instead of container orchestration.
I think nats is a great technology for a number of use cases. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find the resources to support and maintain open source software while paying developer salaries.
Derek put a ton of work, effort, and money into NATS.
It's a sad story to me; I don't know what the answer is to these sorts of "tragedy of the commons" type issues are.