FluxCD Plots Pathway To Post-Weaveworks Success

The FluxCD project has received significant support from multiple companies in the cloud native community as it defines a new path after Weaveworks' sudden collapse earlier this year.

Companies including Microsoft, Gitlab, ControlPlane, Opsworks and several others have publicly declared their support for the project. Core maintainer Stefan Prodan has joined ControlPlane as a principal consultant.

Weaveworks was the original source of the project code and the most significant employer of core maintainers of the project. Its sudden decision to cease operations in February this year came as a shock to the open source community, and highlighted the ongoing sustainability challenges faced by open source projects. 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, a sufficient number of players have become dependent on FluxCD and it is in their individual and collective interests to support the project.

“[T]his is a great example of the strength and resilience of our community and we look forward to Flux’s continued evolution and growth,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF in a statement.

“The Flux project will live on, but we need to ensure that projects are not overly dependent on any one company,” Prodan said, “Or any one individual.”

Prodan will be seeking ideas from the Flux community during KubeCon EU on how to encourage investment in sustaining the project and is exploring various commercial options. He believes there is sufficient value in the Flux project to justify ongoing investment and wants to adopt transparent, shared mechanisms that ensure project maintainers are funded adequately to do the work required.

“We must be pragmatic,” Prodan said. “We can learn from this experience and structure the project to ensure it is sustainable for 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 have chosen to become more closed as a result. Companies such as HashiCorp, Elastic, and Bouyant have concluded that commercial imperatives are incompatible with traditional open source approaches and changed their projects in response. They have adopted various licenses, such as the Business Source License, that encourage commercial entities building profitable businesses on open source foundations to contribute to the ongoing costs of the projects.

Reactions to these licensing changes have been mixed. While many of the more ardent open source aficionados have decried the less open licenses, the majority of end users and customers appear more sanguine. They are more focused on the outcomes they achieve from using the software, and less on the philosophy of licensing approaches.

It is unclear if the changes have helped or hindered the commercial outcomes for the handful of companies that have taken this less open approach. The number of companies choosing this option remains small, and the vast majority of open source projects continue to use licenses that adhere to the traditional definitions of what counts as open source.

What has become clear is that ongoing maintenance of software is costly and requires continuous investment. Given the critical importance of open source software in modern supply chains, finding solutions to the challenge is increasingly important. Hopefully, FluxCD will provide a useful case study in how to structure projects to ensure they remain viable and that maintainers get paid to continue their important work.

The author attended KubeCon EU as a guest of the Linux Foundation.