[sunshine-o]

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.

[imglorp]

Die, how? It's a vibrant project with 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go

Yes, the legal fight may end up permitting the clawback of the trademark, in which case the project will carry on under a different name and repo. But that's not death, that's fork.

The source is out of the bag under Apache 2.0 and there's no putting that back in the bottle.

[mprime1]

> 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go

That's the NATS Go _client_.

The server project is https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server 17k stars, 1.5k forks, 160 contributors

[askbjoernhansen]

Look at the contribution history, basically all active contributors work for Synadia: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/graphs/contributors

That's not a healthy / functioning open source community. Less than 30 people have made more than 10 commits; most of the 160 were "drive by" who fixed a single small thing.

[imglorp]

Good point!

[jen20]

On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.

The vast majority of the work here is being done by a very small group of people - likely those paid by the commercial sponsor (a random sample of the top few suggest that well over half of those top contributors fall into that category).

If those people aren't paid to work on the project any more, it will likely die very quickly.

[sunshine-o]

> On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.

This is something I always do manually and it is annoying. The number of contributors we see on the front page of a project on Github is misleading and can easily be faked by a malicious actor because a user who corrected a typo 5 years ago is counted as a contributor.

Github should really improve that.

[sixdimensional]

I would wonder if paying for a legal fight to recapture the trademark is even worth it.

Couldn't Synadia just fork what they want to and rebrand for a commercial new product, and go forward from there?

If they wanted to backport or keep contributing to the open source project they could, or leave some parts open source going forward, while forking only the server for example, to do that.

Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).

[carlwgeorge]

> Kind of like how RHEL used to still provide contributions to CentOS for a long time (although I think that ended at some point too).

RHEL contributes to CentOS now more than ever.

CentOS started outside of Red Hat (2003), and didn't get any direct contributions from Red Hat. It built from RHEL sources, which is an indirect contribution that didn't involve any Red Hat employees. Later Red Hat hired most of the CentOS maintainers (2014), and contributed to CentOS by paying their salaries and providing hardware resources, but that was where the contributions ended. This was the status quo until 2021, which is when RHEL maintainers were onboarded to CentOS, drastically increasing the number of people working on CentOS.

[sixdimensional]

I was not up to speed, there seemed to be a period of time when CentOS support was dwindling and it even looked like the project might no longer have upstream support.

Regardless of the complex history of CentOS, RHEL, etc it seems like the original thrust of CentOS lives on rebranded as RockyLinux for example.. and CentOS stream serves Redhat's needs/purposes.

I think forking still is a valid method to resolving challenges for NATS here.