Comment by freeplay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeplay | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So they want $2k/month per cluster. It's the exact same open source product. No support is included.

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.

Even the smallest shops have at least 2 clusters

> 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.

Why not here, I also wonder how this is compatible with it being a cncf project.

All the maintainers for linkerd are employed by Buoyant, which means under current graduation criteria it wouldn't have been graduated in the first place. Will be interesting to see if the CNCF TOC does anything about it though.

We’ve seen more products with mostly single maintainers, e.g. Flux and Argo graduating at the same time.

Very interesting question. What happens if a product goes out of compliance?

To my knowledge the CNCF has archived projects [1] before for one reason or another (most commonly inactivity), but I'm not aware of a case where they have actively kicked a project out.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com