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Linkerd stable release paywall worked, Buoyant CEO says
Buoyant's CEO urged other CNCF projects to follow Linkerd's lead in holding back stable releases for paying customers, but analysts don't echo that recommendation.
One test case for an open source software sustainability strategy initiated eight months ago has proven successful, according to an associated vendor CEO.
Citing issues with project viability, officials at Buoyant, the commercial vendor that employs all the core maintainers of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) service mesh project Linkerd, moved in February to remove stable releases of the project from free distribution. Stable releases backport minimal changes so that they're compatible with existing versions of Linkerd with reliability guarantees. Linkerd's source code and edge artifacts, weekly packages of updates without reliability guarantees, remain available for free.
Now, Buoyant CEO William Morgan said he's ready to declare the change a success. The project has added two more core maintainers -- both Buoyant employees, and Buoyant is hiring more support engineers. Features that had languished in the project's backlog have shipped, including IPv6 and Kubernetes Gateway API support.
Buoyant has also doubled its paying customer base and annual recurring revenue, becoming profitable, according to a blog post. Morgan declined to disclose specific numbers in an interview with TechTarget Editorial this week.
"The world of open source has changed since the early days," Morgan said during the interview. "I grew up with Linux as a grassroots community effort; we were all working together to stick it to the man. … Now, we call the CNCF landscape open source, but it really is a very different kind of dynamic. It's not volunteers, it's not nights and weekends work, and we want maintainers to be paid."
Will other CNCF projects follow?
While Morgan doesn't recommend every company that backs an open source software project follow suit with stable release pricing, there are many under the CNCF that are similar to Buoyant and Linkerd that he said could benefit from a similar move. This is especially true since the industry entered the post-zero interest rate policy era, where venture capital funding is no longer as plentiful.
William Morgan
"There's one company behind them, and they have the same dynamics that Linkerd does, which is the audience of adopters. They're SREs, they're DevOps people or Kubernetes experts -- they're not full-time Go programmers," Morgan said. "Contributing a PR [pull request] to a project is not a standard activity for them. And when you have those dynamics, I think the same kind of transition that Linkerd did could be done by any of these projects."
The change was the subject of controversy initially, but at least some current and former users of Linkerd in commercial settings said they're in favor of it -- and that they'd be willing to work with other CNCF projects that adopted a similar approach.
"Having a strong sponsor of any technology you are using is important, so their business needs to be sound," said Chris Campbell, a Linkerd Ambassador based on his previous role at HP. He is evaluating the open source version of Linkerd at his current company, Dutchie, an e-commerce software provider for cannabis retailers in Bend, Oregon, and said he is open to paying for stable release artifacts for use in production.
"Companies are used to paying for software and services, so it's not a massive change for us," Campbell said. "In most cases, we already are paying for CNCF tools through AWS or Google or whoever. … [For example,] we use hosted Kubernetes from AWS through EKS [Elastic Kubernetes Service]."
IT pros that are strongly against Linkerd's approach to stable releases could take over the project if they wanted to, said Christian Hüning, lead system architect at German IT services company BWI GmbH, who used the commercial version of Linkerd at a previous employer. BWI's policies prevent Hüning from discussing what products he uses currently, he said.
"People can still step up and take over the release process and all that for the open source Linkerd," he said. "There's nothing in the way."
Industry analysts said continued viability for Linkerd is a good thing but were cautious about whether more companies should take a similar tack.
"[This] example illustrates, yet again, that open source is not a business model," said Justin Warren, founder and principal analyst at PivotNine in Melbourne, Australia. "Open source has been overused by startups as a go-to-market tactic to gain adoption without enough thought about the broader commercial implications for what is ultimately a for-profit business, not a charity. It was a lot easier to get away with that when money was cheap and getting new funding was easy."
Other companies shouldn't blindly copy Buoyant, Warren said.
"Like Buoyant, they should think carefully about what value they actually offer and what customers are willing to pay for," he said. "Maybe open source is a good choice. Maybe they might be better off running as a commercial software company."
While Buoyant's approach is potentially more lucrative than being "support for hire" for Linkerd, it's still a support-oriented strategy, said Rob Strechay, an analyst at TheCube Research.
"The path Linkerd is following is a tough one from a differentiation perspective," Strechay said. "Effectively, they are going down the support path, which has implications from a staffing and margin perspective versus remaining more of a software company at software margins."
Post-pricing change adjustments
The CNCF's technical oversight committee (TOC) conducted a review of the Linkerd project following the unveiling of the change in February, and recommended updates to the project's governance structure that included a new formal role for Morgan, who is now listed as a project director. The TOC also requested changes to the project's roadmap to better define core and sub-project integration updates. And it referred the project to a technical advisory group focused on contributor strategy to ensure Linkerd's contribution guidelines don't give Buoyant an unfair advantage. That review is ongoing, according to Morgan.
"If there are other companies that want to get involved, there are very clear ways to do that," Morgan said. But Buoyant remains what Morgan now calls the "commercial engine" behind Linkerd. No open source contributors or maintainers from other companies came forward as a result of the change to stable releases, he said.
Initially, pricing for the stable releases of Linkerd was set at $2,000 per Kubernetes cluster for any company with more than 50 employees using the service mesh in production.
But by the time the distribution change took effect in May, pricing had been reworked into a three-tier scheme based on blocks of 100 Kubernetes pods connected to the Linkerd service mesh. The Standard plan, for companies that don't use advanced features such as Layer 7 traffic routing, is priced at $300 per month for the first 100 meshed pods and an additional $50 per month for each additional block of 100. The Premium plan costs $500 for the first 100 pods, and $75 for each additional block. A custom Enterprise plan is also available, but pricing for it was not publicly disclosed.
Linkerd also made changes to how it ships edge artifacts in the process of charging for stable releases, to ensure they're production-quality, even if maintainers make no stability or backward compatibility guarantees, Morgan said.
"We're never going to release anything that we know is not fit for production," he said. "If we ever find an issue in an edge release, we tag it in the release note. … We increased a set of testing that we do for these edge releases, and then we publicly said, 'Hey, these are production ready artifacts, and we stand by that. So if you find a bug in any of these, we'll fix it and ship it in a new edge release.'"
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
