Posted on April 24, 2025

When a company contributes a project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it’s not just sharing code—it’s making a commitment to the open source community. It’s a pledge to uphold open collaboration, shared community ownership, and neutral governance. The CNCF exists to protect these values and principles—ensuring no single entity can dominate, relicense, or claw back what has been given to the community. This principled stewardship fosters trust, diverse contributions, and long-term sustainability.

Those commitments and principles are under threat. Synadia, the original donor of the NATS project, has notified CNCF of its intention to “withdraw” the NATS project from the foundation and relicense the code under the Business Source License (BUSL)—a non-open source license that restricts user freedoms and undermines years of open development.

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.

The Linux Foundation and the CNCF have protected the licensing integrity of open source projects before. There are proper ways for companies to fork projects and take another direction based on business needs. For example, the vendor Grafana forked the CNCF Cortex project under the new name Mimir while the original Cortex project continues to be maintained by the community within CNCF. Synadia’s actions here are markedly different. Rather than creating a fork of NATS under a new name, Synadia wants to unilaterally seize control of the project’s community-owned assets.

Synadia’s recent actions

In addition to planning a license change, Synadia has demanded that CNCF hand over control of the nats.io domain and the nats-io GitHub organization—assets that serve as community infrastructure and have been managed by CNCF since the project’s acceptance in 2018. These demands came despite the fact that:

CNCF has offered multiple paths that would allow Synadia to pursue its goals while respecting open source principles and community governance. Synadia is free to walk away from contributing to the existing NATS project. They’re also free to fork NATS and build a proprietary offering under a new name. What they can’t do is unilaterally claw back a community project and its infrastructure, assets, and branding.

Synadia has unfortunately declined to work with us on an appropriate option that respects open source principles and CNCF community governance processes.

In a further escalation, Synadia’s legal counsel sent a letter challenging the enforceability of CNCF’s project and trademark policies—policies that all CNCF member companies, including Synadia, agreed to in the membership contract they signed. Synadia claims that CNCF’s governance documents are “too vague” to apply to the NATS project—despite a clear statement in the CNCF Charter that “Any project that is added to the CNCF must have ownership of its trademark and logo assets transferred to the Linux Foundation.” 

Meanwhile, Synadia-affiliated maintainers appear to have held a private vote to “exit CNCF” (see meeting minutes and exit proposal) without transparency, without a clear transition plan, and without engaging the broader contributor community that has helped shape NATS.

In short: Synadia is attempting to convert a successful open source project into a closed, commercial product—and take the NATS community’s name, trust, and infrastructure with it. Imagine if Google tried to take back Kubernetes after all these years of it being a neutral open source and community-driven project.

CNCF IP and Trademarks

Open source foundations exist in part to protect the ecosystem from unilateral license changes and other vendor-driven rug-pulls. That’s why CNCF, per its charter (Section 11a), requires all contributed projects to transfer trademark and logo ownership to the Linux Foundation. This ensures that no single vendor can later assert control of the project through trademark rights.

Synadia’s CEO, as one of the original members of the CNCF Governing Board, has been aware of this policy from the start.

When NATS was contributed in 2018, Synadia had already filed for trademark registrations on both the NATS name and logo. Synadia’s CEO explicitly committed—in writing—to transfer those trademarks upon the project’s acceptance into CNCF. However, a trademark dispute with Major League Baseball (MLB) over the name “NATS” (related to the Washington Nationals) delayed the transfer.

To resolve the issue, CNCF paid for legal counsel to work with Synadia’s trademark attorneys throughout 2018–2019. When proposed settlement terms threatened to limit community use, CNCF rejected them. CNCF then presented Synadia with two clear paths:

  1. Rename the open source project and retain “NATS” as a commercial brand for Synadia.
  2. Resolve the dispute with MLB and transfer the marks to CNCF post-settlement.

Synadia chose the latter. Once the dispute was resolved, Synadia requested and was paid $10,000 as a reimbursement from CNCF for Synadia’s NATS trademark registration legal expenses. Yet even after the issue was cleared and the payment was made, Synadia did not complete the promised transfer of the trademark registration.

Today, Synadia still refuses to follow through on its promise—despite years of commitment, financial support, and active stewardship from CNCF. And despite significant contributions from hundreds of other organizations and individuals. 

Not only has Synadia broken its promise; it’s now weaponizing that broken promise against the community and foundation that helped make NATS successful, by asserting that its status as the current holder of record of the NATS trademark registrations entitles it to unilaterally take over project infrastructure and assets that have been community-owned for seven years.

CNCF support of NATS

Since NATS joined the CNCF in 2018, the foundation has provided extensive support—financial, technical, legal, and organizational—to help the project grow, mature, and thrive as a trusted part of the cloud native ecosystem. This support has included:

Thanks to this support—and the dedication of the community—NATS has flourished. Downloads, contributors, and integrations with CNCF and third-party projects (like Helm, Kubernetes, Prometheus, ClickHouse, JetStream, and more) have grown significantly. Although Synadia has indeed been a significant contributor, over 700 other organizations have also contributed to the project.

Contributions under CNCF for past 7 years

Image: Contributions under CNCF for past 7 years

The success and reputation of NATS today is not just due to one company’s efforts—it’s the result of years of community collaboration, CNCF stewardship, and a commitment to open governance. And that’s what we’re committed to defending.

CNCF’s response and actions to protect NATS

CNCF will continue to host and support NATS under its Apache-2.0 license for as long as there is community interest. We are committed to ensuring that NATS continues to be governed openly, available freely, and protected from unilateral takeover. 

With this in mind, CNCF and the Linux Foundation are taking the following actions in response to Synadia’s legal demands:

We will continue to update the CNCF community and ecosystem on our work to protect the project’s open source license and neutral governance. We are sharing this information to foster continued discussion out in the open–within the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and the broader community–following CNCF’s standard governance processes.

You can follow or comment on the discussion about NATS’s future in the CNCF TOC repository. If you’re a NATS user, contributor, or stakeholder, we invite you to help us protect the future of this important project. Please consider becoming a NATS maintainer or increasing your contributions to the project.