Linkerd no longer shipping open source, stable releases
buoyant.io
buoyant.io
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: For people speculating they will not publish stable release branches or git tags either, TFA does say:
>And to be clear, Linkerd continues to be, and always will be, open source. This change is about the release artifacts, not about code, governance, community, or anything else.
... and all their mentions of "stable releases" can be charitably read to only apply to the binaries provided by them, not the source. But I suppose we'll find out for sure in 90 days.
Edit 2: crb's link is more definitive that the source code will also not be published.
You can compile the current unstable development branch, but they'll be keeping the stable release branches secret.
I take the announcement today to mean, every edge release might fuck your shit up in ways that are unpredictable. The canonical authority (linkerd maintainers) are now gating that information behind a paywall.
So the only groups that need to worry about your concern are larger companies that rely on Linkerd for stability. This seems like a reasonable group to attempt to target for revenue.
That's a quote from their blog post. They don't mention stable release branches anywhere. It's safe to assume (I'd love to be wrong) that what's stable and what isn't is behind the paywall, otherwise this change makes no sense, as compiling the project on your own is not hard.
"[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."
*******************************************
* This script is deprecated and no longer *
* installs stable releases. *
* *
* The latest edge release has been *
* installed. In the future, please use *
* run.linkerd.io/install-edge *
* for this behavior. *
* *
* For stable releases, please see *
* https://linkerd.io/releases/ *
*******************************************
I suspect this won't end well for buoyant.
All maintainers of the LinkerD project had @boyant.io email addresses. [0] They do list 4 other members of a "Steering Committee", but LinkerD's GOVERNANCE.md gives all of the power to maintainers: [1]
> Ideally, all project decisions are resolved by maintainer consensus. If this is not possible, maintainers may call a vote. The voting process is a simple majority in which each maintainer receives one vote.
And CNCF Graduation policy says a project must "Have committers from at least two organizations" [2]. So it appears that the CNCF accepted the "Steering Committee" as an acceptable 2nd committer, even though the Governance policy still gave the maintainers all of the power.
I would like to know if the Steering Committee voted to remove stable releases from an un-biased position acting in the best interest of the project, or if they were simply ignored or not even advised on the decision.
I'm all for Boyant doing what they need to do to make money and survive as a Company. But at that point my opinion is that they should withdraw the project from the CNCF and stop pretending like the foundation has any influence on the project's governance.
[0] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/489ca1e3189b6a5289d... [1] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/489ca1e3189b6a5289d... [2] https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/f01a4fab58ee26280f93a40bb39...
> Trademarks and domain names of archived projects are still hosted by the CNCF and the Linux Foundation
> The project is free continue development in its repositories, ideally with a goal to reactivate itself
https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/process/archiving.md#a...
(Its charter [2] requires it to meet quarterly.)
Three of its four members have since left the companies that they were working at, so at this point it seems there are zero to one members.
There is no precedent for removing a project from the CNCF. They could, of course, fork it under a new name.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GDNM5eosiyjVDo6YHXBMsvlp... [2] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/blob/main/STEERING.md
But as a user of linkerd, this is really really grating. Their new offering (BEL) would be around $14k/mo for our org (though they say discounts are available), with 90 days notice. That's a rather large chunk of change I didn't request in our 2024 budget, for a cost-category that didn't exist before.
Having no stability guarantees is, in my opinion, ridiculous.
This statement right here is wild:
> Upgrading between edge releases may involve breaking changes, and may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out.
I'm open to seeing how this fares, but right now, colour me furious.
In terms of the stability guarantees you point out, that has always been the case for edge releases. They contain the latest changes on main, and while we try to keep that as stable as possible, things can break. Everything is well-documented and we try our best to at least have you able to make an informed decision.
Hope that helps, I'm always up for a deeper chat if you want to send me an email. (At the bottom of the blog post.)
"As of Linkerd 2.15.0, the open source project no longer publishes stable releases. Instead, the vendor community around Linkerd is responsible for supported, stable releases."
Even the smallest shops have at least 2 clusters. They want almost 5k a month to download an image from their private container registry? That seems insane.
Also this felt really condescending and out of touch:
> I hate this / you are evil / you have destroyed the beauty of open source. Who can I yell at?
> Hi there, this is William Morgan, Buoyant's CEO. You can email me at william@buoyant.io or you can come find me in person at Kubecon EU in Paris next month. I'm the one who made this decision. (I'm also, perhaps not coincidentally, the person who pays the Linkerd maintainers.) Come talk to me and I'm happy to explain exactly why I did it and all the alternatives and options we considered.
Very interesting question. What happens if a product goes out of compliance?
It's also interesting to think about what that would even look like since part of the project being added to CNCF in the first place were the trademarks etc. got handed over too [2] - not just the code.
[1] https://www.cncf.io/archived-projects/ [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/trademarks
> Who has to pay for BEL?
> Anyone can download and deploy BEL in non-production situations. Companies with fewer than 50 employees do not need to pay to use BEL in production.
> After May 21st, 2024, companies with 50 or more employees must pay to use BEL in production
Iow small shops don’t have to pay anything. And even the largest deployments eg. with a cluster for each developer only pay for the single production cluster.
The original title is burying the lede.