Service Mesh Linkerd Moves Its Stable Releases Behind a Paywall (techtarget.com) 13
TechTarget notes it was Linkerd's original developers who coined the term "service mesh" — describing their infrastructure layer for communication between microservices.
But "There has to be some way of connecting the businesses that are being built on top of Linkerd back to funding the project," argues Buoyant CEO William Morgan. "If we don't do that, then there's no way for us to evolve this project and to grow it in the way that I think we all want."
And so, TechTarget reports... Beginning May 21, 2024, any company with more than 50 employees running Linkerd in production must pay Buoyant $2,000 per Kubernetes cluster per month to access stable releases of the project...
The project's overall source code will remain available in GitHub, and edge, or experimental early releases of code, will continue to be committed to open source. But the additional work done by Buoyant developers to backport minimal changes so that they're compatible with existing versions of Linkerd and to fix bugs, with reliability guarantees, to create stable releases will only be available behind a paywall, Morgan said... Morgan said he is prepared for backlash from the community about this change. In the last section of a company blog post FAQ about the update, Morgan included a question that reads, in part, "Who can I yell at...?"
But industry watchers flatly pronounced the change a departure from open source. "By saying, 'Sorry but we can no longer afford to hand out a production-ready product as free open source code,' Buoyant has removed the open source character of this project," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "This goes far beyond the popular approach of offering a managed version of a product that may include some additional premium features for a fee while still providing customers with the option to use the more basic open source version in production." Open source developers outside Buoyant won't want to contribute to the project — and Buoyant's bottom line — without receiving production-ready code in return, Volk predicted.
Morgan conceded that these are potentially valid concerns and said he's open to finding a way to resolve them with contributors... "I don't think there's a legal argument there, but there's an unresolved tension there, similar to testing edge releases — that's labor just as much as contributing is. I don't have a great answer to that, but it's not unique to Buoyant or Linkerd."
And so, "Starting in May, if you want the latest stable version of the open source Linkerd to download and run, you will have to go with Buoyant's commercial distribution," according to another report (though "there are discounts for non-profits, high-volume use cases, and other unique needs.") The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. The copyright is held by the Linkerd authors themselves. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained in an interview with TNS that the changes in licensing are necessary to continue to ensure that Linkerd runs smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging the releases has also been demanding a lot of resources, perhaps even more than maintaining and advancing the core software itself, Morgan explained. He likened the approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux, which offers Fedora as an early release and maintains its core Linux offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for commercial clients.
"If you want the work that we put into the stable releases, which is predominantly around, not just testing, but also minimizing the changes in subsequent releases, that's hard hard work" requiring input from "world-leading experts in distributed systems," Morgan said.
"Well, that's kind of the dark, proprietary side of things."
But "There has to be some way of connecting the businesses that are being built on top of Linkerd back to funding the project," argues Buoyant CEO William Morgan. "If we don't do that, then there's no way for us to evolve this project and to grow it in the way that I think we all want."
And so, TechTarget reports... Beginning May 21, 2024, any company with more than 50 employees running Linkerd in production must pay Buoyant $2,000 per Kubernetes cluster per month to access stable releases of the project...
The project's overall source code will remain available in GitHub, and edge, or experimental early releases of code, will continue to be committed to open source. But the additional work done by Buoyant developers to backport minimal changes so that they're compatible with existing versions of Linkerd and to fix bugs, with reliability guarantees, to create stable releases will only be available behind a paywall, Morgan said... Morgan said he is prepared for backlash from the community about this change. In the last section of a company blog post FAQ about the update, Morgan included a question that reads, in part, "Who can I yell at...?"
But industry watchers flatly pronounced the change a departure from open source. "By saying, 'Sorry but we can no longer afford to hand out a production-ready product as free open source code,' Buoyant has removed the open source character of this project," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "This goes far beyond the popular approach of offering a managed version of a product that may include some additional premium features for a fee while still providing customers with the option to use the more basic open source version in production." Open source developers outside Buoyant won't want to contribute to the project — and Buoyant's bottom line — without receiving production-ready code in return, Volk predicted.
Morgan conceded that these are potentially valid concerns and said he's open to finding a way to resolve them with contributors... "I don't think there's a legal argument there, but there's an unresolved tension there, similar to testing edge releases — that's labor just as much as contributing is. I don't have a great answer to that, but it's not unique to Buoyant or Linkerd."
And so, "Starting in May, if you want the latest stable version of the open source Linkerd to download and run, you will have to go with Buoyant's commercial distribution," according to another report (though "there are discounts for non-profits, high-volume use cases, and other unique needs.") The Cloud Native Computing Foundation manages the open source project. The copyright is held by the Linkerd authors themselves. Linkerd is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Buoyant CEO William Morgan explained in an interview with TNS that the changes in licensing are necessary to continue to ensure that Linkerd runs smoothly for enterprise users. Packaging the releases has also been demanding a lot of resources, perhaps even more than maintaining and advancing the core software itself, Morgan explained. He likened the approach to how Red Hat operates with Linux, which offers Fedora as an early release and maintains its core Linux offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for commercial clients.
"If you want the work that we put into the stable releases, which is predominantly around, not just testing, but also minimizing the changes in subsequent releases, that's hard hard work" requiring input from "world-leading experts in distributed systems," Morgan said.
"Well, that's kind of the dark, proprietary side of things."
Isovalent Acquisition (Score:3)
Istio is more relevant for enterprise applications (Score:3, Interesting)
The move by Buoyant will only cause a migration to Istio, which is by far more popular
At the time of writing this comment, these are the following GitHub statistics:
istio/istio - 1k watchers, 7.5k forks, 34.5k stars
linkerd/linkerd2 - 190 watchers, 1.2k forks, 10.2k stars
linkerd/linkerd - 206 watchers, 519 forks, 5.4k stars
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Point of service mesh ... (Score:3, Informative)
It is a bit of everything, it is a type of load balancer, itâ(TM)s a bit of consul/etcd, itâ(TM)s a bit of Prometheus and like everything that does a lot, it doesnâ(TM)t do all of them as good as properly architecting your infrastructure in the first place.
Iâ(TM)m sure it has its uses if properly used, but itâ(TM)s yet a layer of indirection and obfuscation.
Re: Point of service mesh ... (Score:2)
"The whole concept is another retarded layer of uselessness designed and built for people who don't understand the problem in the first place, so add another useless middleman layers to it, yea, that'll make it more secure and reliable"
You've just described containers.
Re: (Score:2)
I know I'm very late to the party, but I can probably help here.
Do you need it? Probably not. Is it complicated? Yep, it is.
However there comes a point at which, for some organizations their microservice model has grown in complexity enough to justify implementing it. It's at this point that it makes sense to push a number of features from the microservices themselves down to a layer below. Specifically:
Re: (Score:1)
> for some organizations their microservice model has grown in complexity enough to justify implementing it
For every 500 devs who pretend they work for co's the size of Netflix, only 1 does. Ego? and/or Resume Oriented Programming?
Re: (Score:1)
> The whole concept is another retarded layer of uselessness designed and built for people who don't understand the problem in the first place
It's a combination of job security and resume oriented programming where one tries to get as many buzzwords on their resume as they can, Gotta Catchem' All
Re: (Score:2)
You just need to count from 3 down to 1...