Mirantis K8s Lens closed its source

On January 26th, Mirantis made Lens closed source. I personally found it to be a useful tool, as it provided a good overview of existing Kubernetes clusters and easy access to them. Since I used OpenLens, I did not notice the license change and the removal of the source code until now.

Would love to hear about alternatives or best practices for cluster management below.

Also interested in other tools. I don't mind working on the command line but Lens (and OpenLens later on) has been my tool of choice for keeping an eye and managing on our K8s stuff.

We have been working on an alternative project for several months, and will open its source on April 22nd. I truly believe this project will keep open source forever, it will be a project backed by CNCF Foundation, hope you can give a try after we open its source.

Are you specifically looking for a free Kubernetes GUI?

If you’re open to commercial options, have a look at what Aptakube (https://aptakube.com) can do.

One feature that sets it apart from other UIs is connecting to multiple clusters simultaneously and seeing all resources in a single table.

Disclaimer: I’m the author

I’m sold, just bought a license - we just deployed our first multi cluster application and constantly switching contexts has started to drive me up the wall. Thanks!

As an indie developer I celebrate every small win and this comment made me start the day with extra energy. Thank YOU!

We have been working on an alternative project for several months, and will open its source on April 22nd. I truly believe this project will keep open source forever, it will be a project backed by CNCF Foundation, hope you can give a try after we open its source.

Sounds amazing! Do you have info material/ a landing page I can inspect?

Sure, we do have a live demo: https://karbour-demo.kusionstack.io/, please give a try, any suggestions or feedback is welcome :)

Kindly reminder: this live demo is read only.

Podman Desktop is a good alternative.

It now has a full Kubernetes GUI interface now, is open source (and forever will be), and the benefit is that you can manage your local containers too!

https://podman-desktop.io/blog/podman-desktop-release-1.8

Nice commit message on the removal, “first draft of new readme”

https://github.com/lensapp/lens/commit/e1fc8869a9e0033fb2266...

Stuff like this is why its gets really hard to trust open source projects backed by a single company not in a foundation. Seems like we’ve entered into a spectrum where such open source projects not in a foundation are equivalent to shareware, except instead of forcing payment its relicensed non OSI source visible or closed to achieve the same.

i saw that and thought that it was probably a top contender for "worst commit message of all time"

I was going to be cute and offer "-mbug fixes and performance improvements" but then I remembered that there was some repo posted a few months back where the github tree listed showed "(no message)" and I had no idea that was possible but yup <https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#Documentation/git-commit...>

  $ git init
  $ git commit --allow-empty-message --allow-empty -F /dev/null

I think the fair thing would be to pay each contributor for keeping their previous open source code contributions and if not they would be stealing from the FOSS community.

This will keep happening until people realise open source contributors have bills to pay, after they stop being students building up their hiring portfolio.

> Stuff like this is why its gets really hard to trust open source projects backed by a single company not in a foundation.

It's a general misconception to think that open source projects are inherently trustworthy. "Open source" says nothing about how a project is managed and developed, even if its license aligns with the Open Source Definition. There are individuals and companies who abuse this misplaced trust, just like there are individuals and companies who develop proprietary freeware and shareware software that respects its users, even if it doesn't give them the freedom to view and modify its source code. This is a wide spectrum, and ultimately all software should be judged based on a clean slate, and trust in it should be earned.

See https://github.com/lensapp/lens/tree/master

We have been working on an alternative project for several months, and will open its source on April 22nd. I truly believe this project will keep open source forever, it will be a project backed by CNCF Foundation, hope you can give a try after we open its source.

I personally use k9s in favor of Lens. Some don't like or can't use k9s but if you can its amazingly robust, feature packed and easy to use.

I much prefer k9s to Lens. Definitely worth a look, I don’t use TUIs that much but I live in k9s.

The one that always gets me when I use lens is not being able to one click view pod logs from the deployment object like you can in k9s. Instead you have to drill all the way down to the pod.