The FluxCD project has received significant support from multiple companies in the local cloud community as it defines a new path following the sudden collapse of Weaveworks earlier this year.
Companies including Microsoft, Gitlab, ControlPlane, Opsworks and several others have publicly stated their support for the project. Lead maintainer Stefan Prodan has joined ControlPlane as a lead consultant.
Weaveworks was the original source of the project’s code and the most significant employer of the project’s main maintainers. Its sudden decision to cease operations in February of this year came as a shock to the open source community and highlighted the ongoing sustainability challenges that open source projects face. Many open source projects rely on companies employing key maintainers and allowing them time to work on open source as part of their duties.
The demise of Weaveworks could have threatened the ongoing viability of the FluxCD project. However, enough players have become addicted to FluxCD that it is in their individual and collective interest to support the project.
“[T]he is a great example of the strength and resilience of our community, and we look forward to the continued evolution and growth of Flux,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF in a statement.
“The Flux project will live on, but we have to make sure that the projects don’t depend too much on any one company,” Prodan said, “or on any one individual.”
Stefan Prodan, chief consultant at ControlPlane and chief maintainer of the Flux project.
Prodan will be soliciting ideas from the Flux community during KubeCon EU on how to encourage investment to sustain the project and explore various commercial opportunities. He believes the Flux project has enough value to justify ongoing investment and wants to adopt transparent, shared mechanisms that ensure project maintainers are adequately funded to do the work needed.
We have to be pragmatic, said Prodan. “We can learn from this experience and structure the project to ensure it is sustainable in the long term.”
Finding a way to balance the free and open nature of open source projects with the ongoing costs of maintenance and development has been a perennial challenge. Some groups decided to become more closed because of this. Companies such as HashiCorp, Elastic, and Bouyant have concluded that commercial imperatives are incompatible with traditional open source approaches and have changed their projects in response. They have adopted various licenses, such as the Business Source License, which encourage commercial entities building profitable open source businesses to contribute to the running costs of the projects.
Reactions to these licensing changes have been mixed. Although many open source enthusiasts have condemned less open licenses, most end users and customers seem more optimistic. They are more focused on the results they achieve using the software and less on the philosophy of the licensing approach.
It is not clear whether the changes have helped or hindered commercial results for the few companies that have taken this less open approach. The number of companies that choose this option remains small, and the vast majority of open source projects still use licenses that adhere to traditional definitions of what is considered open source.
What has become clear is that ongoing software maintenance is expensive and requires ongoing investment. Given the critical importance of open source software in modern supply chains, finding a solution to the challenge becomes increasingly important. We hope that FluxCD will provide a useful case study in how to structure projects to ensure that they remain viable and that maintainers are paid to continue their important work.
The author attended KubeCon EU as a guest of the Linux Foundation.