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cncf
foundation
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cncf / foundation

foundation

☁️♮🏛 This repo contains several documents related to the operation of the CNCF. File non-technical issues related to CNCF here.

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10Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
701GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

☁️♮🏛 This repo contains several documents related to the operation of the CNCF. File non-technical issues related to CNCF here.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-04-24 12:52:10 UTC to 2026-05-19 13:23:30 UTC.

01232021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

10 sources
atombender·Apr 25, 2025
If you read the letter from Synadia to the CNCF committee [1], the license change and taking control back to commercialize NATS is the entire reason for the change. It's not because they're unhappy about the CNCF or that they're not getting their money's worth; that is at best a red herring. If they genuinely thought the CNCF's governance was lacking, there are ways for them to take steps to improve the situation without a license change. But that's not what they're doing. They cannot continue at the CNCF if NATS is turned into a proprietary product. All the lofty words about a strong commitment to open source has no merit now. If they were committed to open source, they would stay with the CNCF. I wish companies had the courage to be forthright: Synadia gave something away for free, they now regret that nobody is paying what they think t
Read the rest
hey deserve, and they want the money. It's as simple as that. Those goals — at least in terms of the chosen strategy — are not compatible with open source, and they might as well admit it. [1] https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...
In Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source
d4mr·Apr 24, 2025
I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative. summarising some context for folks; From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: > As should be clear, the NATS.io project has failed to thrive as a CNCF project, with essentially all growth of the project to date arising from Synadia’s efforts and at Synadia’s expense. It is for this reason that Synadia requests to end its relationship with the Foundation and receive full control of the nats.io domain name and Github repository within two weeks. From Synadia's exit proposal: > We propose that NATS.io exit from the CNCF Foundation eff
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ective immediately... Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server... specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license. From CNCF's response: > Let's be clear: this is not a typical license change or fork. It's an attempt to "take back" a mature, community-driven open source project and convert it into a proprietary product—after years of growth and collaboration under open governance and CNCF's stewardship. Primary sources: - Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/... - Synadia's Exit Proposal: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/... - CNCF's Response: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04/24/protecting-nats-and-the-...
In Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source
caniszczyk·Sep 29, 2023
A mature open source project may be governed under an open source foundation which usually gives it a charter https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/charter.md#3-va... ... and/or set of values: https://kubernetes.io/community/values/ There's also a lot of open source guides here https://todogroup.org/resources/guides/ that may help you if you're looking at building mature open source projects.
In Ask HN: OSS discussions you'd call canonical/prototypical for the project?
jaxxstorm·Aug 25, 2023
Terraform was (and I assume currently, OpenTF) under an MPL license, which is not currently compatible with the approved licenses that the CNCF supports: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/allowed-third-p... For them to get accepted into the CNCF would require relicensing a large amount of MPL work. What's always been confusing to me about Hashicorp's change and any subsequent relicense of OpenTF is that I know for a fact not everyone who contributed code to Terraform signed the CLA and allowed permission to relicense. I suspect if OpenTF tries to relicense to a more permissive license like Apache 2 (rather than less in the case of BSL) license we might see some fireworks.
In OpenTF announces fork of Terraform
yebyen·Apr 24, 2021
https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/master/allowed-third... I haven't read the details, or ever seen this policy before (I'm new to both projects) but it was summarized by one of our counterparts at the Linux Foundation here: https://twitter.com/cra/status/1384859663615864833 Tl;dr: licenses must be approved for use, and the CNCF has this list of allowed licenses, AGPL is not on it. The CNCF is in the business of distributing permissively-licensed software is the short version I guess. I don't understand, I don't work on the legal side, I am a dev and I support end users. It seems if your Apache 2.0 licensed project needs to modify and distribute as modified an AGPL project, (which for Grafana it seems likely we will need to do at some point, the Linkerd project already has needed to do this if I understood correctly) then you cannot
Read the rest
distribute them together, or something about this becomes much more complicated. Chris says they are going to try to work something out, but when a component has made a decision to re-license with a restrictive-copyleft license such as AGPL, I don't know what there is that can be done to fix it. I hope they come up with something. Maybe the CNCF adopts AGPL too, (which would mean that then all those "viral-GPL" FUD-spreaders will have been right...) that seems counter-productive if that is the outcome. (So I hope they come up with something else than that!) Everyone is within their own rights to do whatever they want with the output of their own labor, I just wanted to help dispel the notion that only exploitative companies are affected by this change. If the "why" rather than the mechanical/legal "what" is what you're after, this is the CNCF position paper on the topic: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/ > Proponents of copyleft licenses have argued that these licenses prevent companies from exploiting open source projects by building proprietary products on top of them. Instead, we have found that successful projects can help companies’ products be successful and that the resulting profits can be fed back into those projects by having the companies employ many of the key developers, creating a positive feedback loop.
In Minio Changes License to AGPL

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