[rcombatwombat]

Two points:

From the exit proposal: "Over 97% of contributions to the NATS.io server were made by employees of Synadia and its predecessor company".

Also, when they applied for graduation in 2018, they were told no because most of the contributors work for Synadia (https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/168). As of now 7 years later, it's still not graduated by CNCF. At this point it likely never will.

Putting yourself in their shoes, are your surprised they want to take it back from CNCF?

[nchmy]

at the same time, in the graduation application, they seemed to strongly argue that they didnt even want outside contributors - saying that having community-developed client libraries and a synadia-developed core server was both proof of broad adoption and reason for future stability.

[d4mr]

not surprised, I agree the decision makes sense for them. It's just an unfortunate situation for the community. We don't know what the BUSL license would entail, and an open-source fork is unlikely to receive a lot of contribution (if historical contribution data is anything to judge by)