Some Linkerd Users Must Pay: Fear and Anger Explained
Buoyant’s decision to charge organizations with 50 or more users for access to the stable releases of its open source service mesh has certainly evoked ire and anger expressed on the Xsphere (formerly Twittersphere) and elsewhere. This reaction is understandable, given that this service mesh — stable releases and all — has been available for free for a while, and many users, including enterprises, have at least grown accustomed to it.
However, as the dust settles following the announcement, it appears that there’s some misunderstanding about what this move actually means. It also shows how the open source model and availability of what’s on offer for free are changing. This shift may be arguably understandable when considering the broader context of how open source business models are evolving.
Meanwhile, the backlash continues.
Linkerd creator and Buoyant founder and CEO William Morgan says he understands users’ and the community’s anger over the decision. He likens their reaction as if Linkerd were organic produce and an entire albeit expensive dinner menu were on offer for free.
“Some organizations may have built their whole life around these stable releases, and now we’re saying, ‘Oh, sorry, you’ve got to pay for it now,’” Morgan told The New Stack. “I understand where they’re coming from.”
What Buoyant is not doing is changing the licensing scheme of Linkerd. The licensing remains under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Additionally, likely unbeknownst to many, Buoyant is not forcing users to pay for the enterprise version to access stable releases. This is because it already released an enterprise version in 2023.
It is highly likely that criticism of Boyant’s was due to the aftertaste from when HashiCorp revealed in August 2023 that it was changing the licensing terms of its leading Infrastructure as Code platform Terraform. It then replaced its open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) with the Business Source License (BSL) v1.1, which restricts the use of the code in production. Prior to the Terraform licensing change, MongoDB’s, Elastic’s and others’ had shifted from offering purely open source licenses for software.
Instead, Buoyant’s change to Linkerd is more akin to when Red Hat opted to no longer make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) source code available.
“I think people are really twitchy after Terraform. They heard Buoyant was changing their release model and were encouraging people to download an enterprise release,” Dan Garfield, co-founder and chief open source officer of Codefresh, an enterprise project built on Argo CD. “They probably were like, ‘Oh, this is just what HashiCorp did.’ Well, it’s not what HashiCorp did because they didn’t change their license.”
Torsten Volk, an analyst for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), disagreed. “They might not have changed their license, but Buoyant still changed the economics and risk profile for Linkerd users of all shapes and sizes,” Volk told The New Stack. “Enterprises that have adopted free open source Linkerd are already paying for the engineering team needed to deploy and operate the platform,” Volk said. “Having to start paying additional fees might just not make financial sense for them.”
Meanwhile, the trend for open source projects that “go commercial” is accelerating, Volk said. “We automatically wonder what the future holds for open source in general: Is it just not possible to base a profitable business on open source?” Volk said. “The ‘Terraform shock’ was the beginning of this new trend where software companies of any size have to continuously explain to their board of directors why it is that they are giving away thousands of developer hours to the open source community each year. In days of drying up venture capital, this is becoming a harder argument to make.”
The Linkerd Niche
Open source Linkerd is a popular service mesh known for its low power and simplicity of use, suitable for both small and large organizations. Linkerd continues to make use of service mesh sidecars, representing another differentiation compared to Istio, a service mesh that offers a sidecar-less alternative that is also considered more geared for larger organizations. It is for this reason that Morgan says he seeks to help the small guy by continuing to offer organizations with fewer than 50 users free use of Linkerd’s stable releases. Those organizations that have more than 50 users must pay $2,000, while the terms of the offer could change, Morgan said.
Buoyant will continue to invest in maintaining stability between Linkerd releases, through regression and other testing and development. While, in theory, users should be able to install and use Linkerd from the latest commits on GitHub, there are still some elements that will remain in the trial phase, for users and maintainers to work with to help improve the code. What changes is how some organizations will have to pay for those stable releases.
“We made that free for companies under a certain threshold,” Morgan said. “So, as part and parcel of this, you know, we’re like, ‘okay, well, we can build a whole ecosystem and do this. Let’s take this thing, which actually is a lot better than the stable releases of the past and make them better.’”
The governance of a project is a key attribute to take into account. In the case of Argo CD, which leads with Flux as a platform for GitOps, changing what is and what is not for free is more difficult to do than it is with Buoyant thanks to its governance structure. “If you are worried about something changing, you’d look at our governance and you’d say, ‘okay, in Argos’ case, this is shared among primarily four main company maintainers, but then also a lot of community maintainers, and they would have to have a vote to change like this,” Garfield said. “So, governance is really important for this kind of stuff because it informs you about what kind of weight you need for this stuff to change. You need a lot of people to agree to change it in Argo’s case.”
Conversely, Linkerd has been maintained primarily by Buoyant. From a governance standpoint, Buoyant thus has much more control over the project’s future. “People were like, “I just thought that if it were an open source project, you are supposed to provide stable releases” and I would respond ‘I don’t know who told you that since that’s not written down anywhere and none of the CNCF graduation criteria mention it,’” Garfield said. “They’ve been providing these stable releases for you but no one promised that would be the case forever.”
The Business Model
Buoyant has been by large the biggest contributor to Linkerd and the investment in its production releases have represented a considerable chunk of its work in support of the project. At the same time, it has been challenging of late to sustain the development of open projects on which business models are directly based. A lack of venture capital and other dynamics have largely contributed to the less-than-cash-flush climate. The recent demise of Weaveworks, which created Flux and first coined the term “GitOps,” is a sad earmark of the current open source business climate.
“The stuff in the industry around us is changing as companies are realizing, ‘holy crap, we need to make money. We need to have a viable business model,’” Morgan said. “The days of free VC money kind of making everything easy aren’t here. We’ll see it again in the future, but right now, it’s not there.”
It can be argued in many cases that businesses built directly on open source so that success hinges almost exclusively on converting open source users to paying for enterprise product projects. Conversely, many companies are seeing success by sharing the work of devoting time and effort to open source projects, which help support their business models indirectly. These projects may depend in part on benevolent people who help to sustain these projects while their business model is not primarily based on the success of the open source project.
As one of the most famous open source projects to date, Kubernetes is largely dependent on Google’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s contributions. They are contributing to that project and helping maintain it in some of the most important ways because they have built core value on their platform on top of Kubernetes and want to continue to invest in the core underlying platform, Garfield said.
Kubernetes remains open, and users can add some extensions and other features, while the experience of deploying Kubernetes on different platforms is similar enough that users can expect my Helm chart to work on both platforms, Garfield said. “Kubernetes has a very safe future. You’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell that Kubernetes suddenly changes its distribution model or its licensing model or whatever, again, because the governance is there,” Garfield said. “The incentives are aligned in such a way that it would just be very, very difficult for anybody to do that.”
Volk offered a sterner look at the business viability of Buoyant versus Kubernetes. “The hyperscalers are using Kubernetes to sell more of their highly addictive services and therefore they see direct revenue in return for putting in the dev hours. This is especially the case as a large share of their contribution are targeted toward integrations with their own cloud services,” Volk said. “Buoyant however failed to convince open source users that there is value in paying for enterprise support and therefore had no choice but to step out of the open source line and straight into the wrath of current enterprise users.”
