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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

Linkerd is a CNCF graduated project. It's unclear whether CNCF projects are owned by the CNCF or not, but in any case, it is clear that being a CNCF project you have to abide by certain rules. An organization unilaterally making decisions outside of the CNCF governance model seems to be completely against the rules.

I suspect this won't end well for buoyant.

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Looks like CNCF waved them through Graduation anyway, let's look at policies from July 28, 2021 when they were deemed "Graduated"

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...

The Linkerd steering committee only met three times, most recently in May 2021. [1]

(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

Once a project is donated to CNCF, it is donated in full. You cannot withdraw. They would need to withdraw from the project, but they cannot withdraw the project itself.

The project's governance says the maintainers can vote to make a decision. Why can't they vote to leave the CNCF?

I guess the answer may be that they can ask the CNCF to archive them, but the CNCF/Linux Foundation technically controls the domain and trademarks. So I guess they would need the CNCF to release those back to the project if they wanted to withdraw or move to another foundation. Interesting.

> 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...

Correct, once the project is donated to CNCF, so is the trademark. Even if CNCF votes to archive the project, the trademark is still owned by them. I haven't seen an instance where CNCF released them.

As sibling said, I think the right move is they withdraw from linkerd, and start their own project. CNCF should appoint new stewards of the project or archive it.

You bring up a great point. There's already a wide range for what it means to be a "CNCF graduated project" in my opinion, but this further dilutes that meaning.

There's already a wide range for what it means to be a "CNCF graduated project", not it's a list of projects https://www.cncf.io/projects/ that met certain conditions. You could argue about the conditions but being a CNCF graduate project is literary you are on this list.

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