NATS and the CNCF Kerfuffle  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: NATS and the CNCF Kerfuffle - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/65e349cc-88dc-4408-abff-dd577e23956f ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **NATS Origin Story** - Derek Collison built NATS originally as a lightweight, reliable messaging system to replace heavier alternatives like TIBCO and RabbitMQ. - He created it quickly over a weekend, with initial applications still compatible with today's versions. Transcript: Jerod Santo Forever now, right? Yeah. Derek Collison Nats was kicked off as part of a system that I was building at the time at VMware called Cloud Foundry, right? Which was my spin on Heroku for the enterprise back in, you know, 2010, I guess, you know, and at the time, you know, I had come off of time at Google, spent about eight years there. But prior to that was at a company called Tipco, which before that was called Technicron. And we have been designing lots of messaging systems that then were used to scale up distributed systems for customers and clients. So I just had a natural way of building systems like command and control, telemetry, eventing, using these types of constructs. But TIBCO was closed source, right? And so we couldn't use that. And so we reached out to Alexis Richardson, who was running a company that was kind of in charge of RabbitMQ, which at the time was kind of, you know, the major open source player from a Messaging construct. And, you know, Rabbit and Q is still part of, I think, VMware slash Broadcom now, part of Cloud Foundry or whatever that has turned into be. But at the time, it was more of an enterprise type of technology. What I mean by that is that if you asked it to do something, it would bend over backwards trying to do it for you, even at the detriment of everyone else. And, you know, we had some challenges there, which led to the creation of Nats, which was, you know, kind of like a dial tone and think of it like the electricity in your house or your condo Or whatever. It's, you know, I can plug in a really bad blender and I might blow out something in my own place, but hopefully it doesn't take out the electric grid, you know, for the whole neighborhood. And so Nats was born on a very simple principle of just do a couple of things very, very well. And, yeah, it was the proverbial weekend project. So I left on a Friday and Monday, you know, we plugged it in. And believe it or not, applications that were written for that initial version, you know, the protocol that speaks between the clients and servers still run today. You know, so that you can just fire up something from the Cloud Foundry days and just run it against a modern net server and it just works. So we've tried very, very hard and we're not perfect by any stretch, but we tried really, really hard to make sure we were always backward compatible with the protocol. And because we knew the protocol, even though it was designed very, very quickly in only a couple of days, that was kind of the really big thing from a technology standpoint there. Adam Stacoviak I'm not a distributed systems person, but Nats feels a lot to me like tail scale, but at a different layer. Is that how you would describe it to somebody who doesn't build distributed systems or have sort of the depth and knowledge you might have? Derek Collison Yeah, I'm a huge fan of tail scale and, you know, the folks that were either at Google or involved in the Go programming language that are over there. But it's an overlay on top of the constructs that we still know, which is IP-based addressing, almost everything is point-to Most, I don't know about Tailscope, but most cloud providers Write trunk UDP broadcasts or multicasts. And so it's, you know, a point-to location-dependent type of a system that now has surfaced up over a very secure overlay with WireGuard. What NAS was trying to do was kind of change the notion of what we call intelligent connectivity. And specifically when, you know, folks that are listening say, well, what does that mean? It's really fairly simple from an abstract standpoint, which is everything is location independent, right? And so one might say, oh, well, things are kind of location independent today. But I would argue that there's a lot of unnatural apps going on below the covers to get that to appear that way. Load balancers, GSLB, any cast DNS tricks. Right. So the biggest first one is location independence. And the second one is instead of one to one request reply is the dominant pattern. HDP, that's all you can kind of do, SANS, SSE, and WebSockets. We are end-to and both push and pull. And the push becomes very, very interesting for certain use cases where instead of keep asking, hey, have you updated your temperature? Have you updated your temperature? Just tell me whenever you update your temperature, right? And for scalability and distributed systems, just those primitives from the connective layer become pretty powerful, right, at scale. Jerod Santo So Nats really took off, right? I mean, huge adoption. Can you tell a story? Derek Collison Yeah. So, I mean, Nats was built specifically to power those subsystems in Cloud Foundry, right? And I had no desire to do anything more than that. And so it was for at least probably the first 18 months of its lifetime, specifically geared toward just supporting what we needed in Cloud Foundry from command and control, telemetry, Eventing, things like that. When we started the company AppSara, which was trying to do a redo of Cloud Foundry on some of the things I felt I didn't spend enough time and energy on, security, governance, federation, All these different types of things. We rewrote NATs in Go. NATs was originally written in Ruby. That's what Cloud Foundry was written in. Still love the language. Not great to deploy things into production that are Ruby-based, although I know DHH has done an amazing job of trying to simplify that. But back in the day, there was a lot of moving pieces to deploy this thing. And we were starting to hit some performance issues with very, very large systems needing more performance there. So we had, at least at the time, we were looking at either Node.js, JavaScript, or Go, which was very brand new. I think when I started playing with it, it was 0.52. And I felt that the speed advantage with the concurrency, the I.O. Mechanisms that they had, but mostly the fact that you could build pretty much a static binary, meaning shipping to production was just move one binary, was the direction that we took. And it was a great direction. I mean, I think Go has grown up and, you know, there's people that like it and people maybe that don't like it, which is totally fair. But we've gotten a tremendous amount of mileage out of it. And at the time, looking back, it was the absolute right decision. Now, going forward, when we're looking at massive, massive extreme scales that some of our customers are pushing us on, we're starting to bump into some things in Go that we need to address. And whenever I'm in a language and we start to do unnatural acts to get around certain things within the language, that's when we kind of say, all right, let's take a step back and are we At another inflection point? And we're not there right now, but with the introduction of Jetstream, which is the data persistence mechanism that Nats uses that was added on, you know, about four, four and a half, Five years ago, I guess, we're starting to see a lot of friction with the way Go does DiskIO and things like that. ([Time 0:06:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a3159955-d8bd-41bb-9123-60edc7f59c84)) - **NATS vs Traditional Systems** - NATS allows location-independent messaging unlike traditional IP-dependent systems like Tailscale. - It supports end-to-end messaging with push and pull, making it scalable for diverse cloud native use cases. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Systems person, but Nats feels a lot to me like tail scale, but at a different layer. Is that how you would describe it to somebody who doesn't build distributed systems or have sort of the depth and knowledge you might have? Derek Collison Yeah, I'm a huge fan of tail scale and, you know, the folks that were either at Google or involved in the Go programming language that are over there. But it's an overlay on top of the constructs that we still know, which is IP-based addressing, almost everything is point-to Most, I don't know about Tailscope, but most cloud providers Write trunk UDP broadcasts or multicasts. And so it's, you know, a point-to location-dependent type of a system that now has surfaced up over a very secure overlay with WireGuard. What NAS was trying to do was kind of change the notion of what we call intelligent connectivity. And specifically when, you know, folks that are listening say, well, what does that mean? It's really fairly simple from an abstract standpoint, which is everything is location independent, right? And so one might say, oh, well, things are kind of location independent today. But I would argue that there's a lot of unnatural apps going on below the covers to get that to appear that way. Load balancers, GSLB, any cast DNS tricks. Right. So the biggest first one is location independence. And the second one is instead of one to one request reply is the dominant pattern. HDP, that's all you can kind of do, SANS, SSE, and WebSockets. We are end-to and both push and pull. And the push becomes very, very interesting for certain use cases where instead of keep asking, hey, have you updated your temperature? Have you updated your temperature? Just tell me whenever you update your temperature, right? And for scalability and distributed systems, just those primitives from the connective layer become pretty powerful, ([Time 0:09:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5374e8c-cce1-49b1-8315-7d555ad6324c)) - **Open Source and Synadia Founding** - Derek pitched open sourcing NATS while at VMware and released it as MIT licensed software. - Synadia was founded in 2017 to commercialize NATS for modern distributed systems, especially with an eye toward the growing Edge computing trend. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak In 2017? Derek Collison Yeah, it's an interesting story. So one of the things that folks might not know is that when we were doing Cloud Foundry, VMware had never released anything that was open source. And my pitch to Paul Maritz at the time, who was the CEO who was running VMware, I said, I really think we'll have more bang for the buck here if this is released as open source. And so when I did Nats, I said, I'm not going to keep this closed. So I actually just opened it as MIT, right? And then we did, I can't remember what license we put on CloudFinder, but it was open source, which was a really big deal. When we went to AppSera, we did the rewrite and go. And we started to contemplate whether or not this could be something bigger than just an OSS project. I mean, it was powering all of the AppSera stuff, but similar to Cloud Foundry, right? Telemetry, command and control, and eventing. And so as we looked at AppSera, and AppSera was doing a commercial version of Cloud Foundry++ to be very, very simplistic about it. But as soon as Kubernetes came out, you know, certain things Kubernetes did that people liked, certain things that the Absera continuum platform did, they liked, you know. So it wasn't a technical battle per se. It was where is the consumer bias going? And Kubernetes, because no individual stakeholder needed to make direct money off of it, drove the consumer bias to zero. And so our ACV started declining. And so I called an emergency board meeting and said, hey, you know, I see the writing on the wall and all I can tell you for the 30 plus million dollars left in the bank over the next four years Is that we can tread water, but I don't think it'll change the outcome. And that I think pulling it into Ericsson and doing something constructive with some of the internal projects that I know they were working on made better sense. At that point in time, there were certain people that were going to leave, certain people that were going to stay with Ericsson. And then there was Nats, the team that was working on Nats in the middle. And at the time, Ericsson said, yeah, we don't necessarily have any need for Nats. It's open source. We can use it. But if you want to do something with it, we can. And a bunch of folks internal prior to that decision-making process had already kind of approached me saying, hey, we might be able to build a business out of this under the assumptions That distributed systems will continue to have more moving pieces, but more importantly, that these pieces are going to start to be stretched out. So stretched out across regions, across multiple cloud providers, but more importantly, out to this at the time, new thing called edge. And the bet that we made was that Edge would dominate interaction models and would dwarf cloud within probably a decade. And that cloud's not going anywhere. Don't misread that, but that cloud would become the new mainframe, but all the interactions would be at the edge. And the rules are very, very different. So as many rules changed as we went from data centers into cloud, and we had the Roku guys, Adam Wright and the, you know, the, was it the 12, you know, things, 12 factor apps. And then of course, cloud native architecture, of course, then the CNCF, all of those things, you know, that step function from data centers to that, I believe will be even bigger stepping From cloud into edge, where it's not batteries included. Can't bring all the stuff that the cloud is offering, and you have to kind of not think differently about the what, meaning you're still drawing the same triangles and squares on a whiteboard As you're architecting, but the how would be radically different. And so that's when we made the leap to create Cynadium at the end of 2017, based around a foundation that modern distributed systems will look very different than they do today. And they will be pushed very hard in terms of dynamic agility. They can change all the time. Again, I probably am further along career-wise than some folks on the call, but it used to be that when a system was set up like this in the 90s, early 90s, no ([Time 0:23:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5164031-b4c9-47b2-a636-3d791d3a70ef)) - **Enterprise Usage vs Funding Gap** - Large enterprises use NATS in production without engaging commercial agreements with Synadia. - This creates sustainable funding challenges for Synadia despite widespread critical use. Transcript: Jerod Santo The can of worms around OSS? Most recently there's been a, I don't know what you call it, a skirmish, a disagreement. Kerfuffle. A kerfuffle between CNCF and yourself, Zanadia, specifically around NATS and its involvement in CNCF and potential relicense. Of course, we've been here many times in the world of open source and business and licensing. It's something that everyone's trying to figure out. And some people have or have not, and then other people think they have and then they have not. And then things change and people are offended. And so there's been a lot of, I don't know if maybe drama is just the best word, around the business and the project. Maybe start with the CNCF and Nats' relationship to it prior to the most recent blog posts and press releases. Yeah. Derek Collison So what the audience might not know is that the CNCF was kicked off at a large meeting at the Switch Data Center in Las Vegas, of which I attended. And I was actually part of the founding governing board. So a lot of people might think, oh, Derek's role with the Nats project and Nats being a project in the CNCF, that's kind of the totality of it. But that's not the case, right? ([Time 0:31:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/034fe5e2-cf94-46b3-85b0-0fa348987a74)) - **NATS and CNCF Fit Tensions** - NATS and CNCF had differing views on project fit, especially regarding governance and contributor diversity. - Synadia questioned whether a single-company driven project like NATS fits CNCF's evolving criteria. Transcript: Jerod Santo Prior to the most recent blog posts and press releases. Yeah. Derek Collison So what the audience might not know is that the CNCF was kicked off at a large meeting at the Switch Data Center in Las Vegas, of which I attended. And I was actually part of the founding governing board. So a lot of people might think, oh, Derek's role with the Nats project and Nats being a project in the CNCF, that's kind of the totality of it. But that's not the case, right? From a consumption perspective, the users to the people that are the companies that want to utilize that. And then, of course, the project themselves. And then for me, it was like the companies that are driving said projects. In the case of something like Kubernetes, where it's, you know, all of the big boys, so to speak, there's not a lot that the CNCF needs to do that, right? It's kind of taken on a life of its own and it's marching down a path. What we ([Time 0:32:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9149281d-1923-46cd-8d04-a235bd307167)) - **Project Exit Negotiation Challenges** - Synadia sought CNCF's approval to leave the foundation with conditions to retain open source commitments. - CNCF insistence that projects cannot leave CNCF is unprecedented and opposed by Synadia. Transcript: Derek Collison Thought that was worth a discussion. For sure. Adam Stacoviak How much time before the blog posts that I think broke the news, so to speak, from the CNCF directly, how much, how much behind the scenes conversation was going on to sort of illustrate Your points and your concerns? Like, was there a meeting? Okay. So this, this was a surprise. Derek Collison Yeah. So we were not, we had gotten to a point where we were trying to assert the fact that, you know, we wanted them to consider letting us leave. And they were stuck on some of the trademark stuff, right? And so for the listeners, you know, who haven't been in this, when you're doing negotiations behind the scenes, you posture up and you do all kinds of stuff. And then you figure out when you can't move the stakes anymore and then you make a decision. Right. And our decision was always going to be, hey, if they dig in, even if our our legal team say that we could potentially win this, we have to consider the damage to the ecosystem and whether Or not it's worth it. And we had already probably decided that they were just going to dig their heels in and say, nope, you absolutely can't do that. If you want to go down that, it'll have to be a legal recourse that we were going to say, OK, we'll figure out something else. But they I can't speak on their behalf and I'm not trying to. And again, I'm extremely encouraged by my talks with the Linux Foundation and some of the ongoing stuff with the CNCF and that mutual statement. Again, everybody's had a hand in that pie, so it kind of gets diluted down. But I can tell you from my individual discussions with folks, especially at the Linux Foundation, I'm very encouraged with them saying, okay, let's see if we can do better here, you Know, which is all I really kind of wanted at the time. But I did feel that, you know, we could be a good steward. And if we could say, hey, here's what we're committing to. And that is commensurate with kind of what the CNCF, you know, is doing around certain projects. I thought it was worth the discussion to have. Now, a lot of people don't agree with that and have very, you know, emotional responses to that. And although I don't necessarily agree with it, I understand that people will fight very hard for consumption being zero, but production is never zero. Someone has to pay for it, right? I mean, you know, unless it's just something, it's time or money or both. And so we were concerned enough to say, hey, let's have a discussion about ([Time 0:38:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5112357e-8b46-4f4e-991c-2197b7c4aedb)) - **NATS Trademark Battle** - Synadia fought a trademark dispute over NATS name successfully, retaining trademark ownership. - CNCF expected trademark transfer upon graduation, but never pursued it after Synadia's victory. Transcript: Derek Collison But it wasn't necessarily compatible with the CNCF, but they were still committed to the open source nature, you know, of what they were trying to do, but it wasn't compatible California. And so the CNCF said, nothing ever leaves. So you can fork it and then abandon this one. And that's what they had to do. And again, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but when they purport that's a success story, I talk to other people and it doesn't feel as much of a success story, right? Mimir started and that's what almost everyone on the Grafana side uses. And I think Cortex is mostly supported by AWS so that they can run it, not have to pay anything to Grafana, right? Again, the consumption of zero is a sense of entitlement that I also think is kind of interesting, but production side is never zero, right? Someone's got to pay. Adam Stacoviak Yeah, it's a hard position to be in whenever it almost knowing this, I think maybe this even exposes a different scenario where maybe you were not fully aware like jerry was asking like Were you aware of x y and z when you first joined the cncf you incubated that whole process and i think over time you get uh you know more and more privy to certain details that are truths About what it truly means to join the cncf and i'm not saying anything negative or bad but uh not being able to leave like coming in the door not being able to leave with the thing you think About over a weekend and you name is is challenging because if you don't pass the bar of incubation and graduate and you're not a i don't know what it means to not graduate does that mean You're like not to graduate even like what does that mean yeah i don't get it all all of it like does that mean you're not valuable does that i don't understand the graduation status is Either I'm sure there's a lot of nuance too. Derek Collison Yeah, there is. And even after our TOC process around graduation, where we did not graduate, there was a slight change that said incubating or graduated projects are considered mature and production Ready. But within the grand scheme of things, someone from the outside, a user, right, who's saying, I'm just looking for some software that might solve my problem. You know, they see graduated as a higher level than incubating. And so they're like, why haven't you graduated? Because you've been here for a while. You started at incubating, you know, back in 2018, I think, is when we officially joined. If I recall correctly, I might be off on that one. And so, yeah, I wanted a conversation. We had spent, you know, and I'm not saying that CNCF has not also worked to promote NATs, you know, maybe not as much as Kubernetes and things like that and KubeCon or whatever, but they Did do a part there. But we lived and breathed this 7x24x365 for almost 15 years now, right? We've put, you know, everything we can, and not just myself. It's just, you know, all the folks that were at Upsera and then, of course, now at Cinedia. And I'm not saying that what we thought was necessarily correct per se, but I find it interesting when people go, oh, you really don't care about the project, you know what I mean? Or you're just trying to do a money grab and gouge people for money at this time. That's a little unfortunate. I get it. And again, I know this whole topic is very emotional and I can appreciate that. But that's about as far from the truth as you could possibly get from what we were really trying to do. And again, if you looked at some of these companies, and, you know, we talked to other customers of ours, big, big customers, and said, oh, you know, these people that are kind of on the Same level of you and the Fortune 50, they refuse to pay. And when that kind of came up, they actually kind of changed their tone and said, ooh, so we could actually get access to stuff that we're helping fund by having a commercial relationship With Sanadia for a period of time, two years before, you know, on one conversation, they called them the freeloaders. Pizza shop out of Venice. It's, you know, people on the fortune 50 that have the means to pay. And this isn't a little internal developer tool. It's a production, you know, level critical service. They actually went, oh yeah, ([Time 0:50:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2fb4e350-4824-4051-b09b-a3a6c4061d13)) - **Advocating Sustainable OSS Business Models** - Open source sustainability requires finding business models that fairly compensate maintainers and contributors. - Users should recognize that production usage is never truly free and support critical projects financially. Transcript: Derek Collison To make sure the facts are correct, right? The whole licensing and leaving the CNCF were conflated when they never should have been because they were never conflated in my initial conversations with- Unrelated conversations. Yeah. They just asked me and said, hey, because this is a problem. We're seeing this and we don't know what to do about it yet, but we wanted to know. And I'm like, yeah, because I said, we're starting to see, you know, said three letter, you know, companies use our stuff and get a lot of value and contribute nothing back. And I'll be very transparent. Yes, contributions comes in a lot of ways. But for a company like Cinedia, a commercial agreement and funds is the only one we really care about. Yes, we care about issues and PRs and all that other stuff. But, you know, just being very, very transparent, they don't keep the lights on. And again, Sanedia has plenty of money and we have lots of revenue opportunities and we're driving lots of those. But at the time, I was like, this to me feels wrong. You know, it just doesn't feel correct that the consumer bias is being driven to zero for companies that it makes sense for them, right? Because if you sell a piece of hardware or service, it's kind of nice to have a guarantee that all the software you're going to use to augment that will always be free and keeps your margins Where they are. I just think as an ecosystem, we're evolving, things are changing, you know, the CNCF has changed a lot, you know, that we still need to kind of think through some of these and figure out What do we really want as a global ecosystem around this. And charity is not a business model, right? So the whole notion of, oh, you can do donations, that's not a business model. And so what this lesson has taught me is, is that the biggest challenge, obviously, is in a company that develops OSS software that wants to make a business off of that software, specifically As software, not necessarily as a service, right? The consumer bias, right? So if it's something physical or somebody's running something for you, your natural bias is, oh, I have to pay for that. But if I give you a piece of software that we spent over 30 some million dollars developing over the last decade or so, you start to see this notion of entitlement. Oh, I deserve this for free. And I don't have to give anything back. And we even have some people that just like bark orders at us like, you need to do this in the system. And we're like, okay, that's interesting. You're not a customer. We don't even know if you use it. And everyone has these problems, right? All the OSS projects have these problems. But for what we were looking at, I was like, that doesn't feel right to me. And I wanted to reach out and open a dialogue and have conversations that would hopefully spur, you know, some constructive dialogue. But just for the record, you know, we never were abandoning open source. We were never going to blanket re-license everything. That's just simply conflation of facts in the media and then people reacting to them and then that being amplified, you know, quite a bit over the social media channels. Um, so that's the, you know, I have no problem with people being emotional about it. Um, but ([Time 0:56:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1f3b072a-099e-4f2d-adc7-0c6fc2dfd46a)) - **Synadia’s New Commercial Strategy** - Synadia is shifting from BSL relicensing plans to a composition-based commercial offering. - They will commit all new features to Apache 2 licensed server immediately, avoiding delays from license transitions. Transcript: Jerod Santo Going to do now? Are you still trying to figure it out? Derek Collison No, we've been meeting every day since the whole debacle started. And so we already had gone down a path of doing composition via SynodIP. So what I mean by that is that a lot of customers came to us and said, hey, we want to take control over Authent and LLC, right? We have a pretty rich Authent and LLC system, but they go, it's not enough, right? We need something else. And you could imagine a world where we said, oh, we're going to do a Synadia server and we'll put all that stuff in there, right, somehow. Instead, and this is already done, this code was done probably a couple years back. We did an off callout mechanism, meaning the AP2 server, you can say, hey, you're no longer in charge. Something over there is in charge, right? And then we, Synadia, could build lots of IP around a lot, you know, for off end, you know, XYZ, OPA, integrations, things like that. And so we already were going down that path. So our decision now is, is we will not do a BSL stuff. You know, we know we have the right to reserve the right to do a commercial fork. But I think what we're going to do is we're going to post and we can do this in the show notes of everything we've committed to go into the AP2 server without any delay. The BSL would have had a delay on there. And that we're going to expand our commercial offerings through composition, meaning you're running the server, but now all a sudden it's got, you know, security appliance, which We've been working on and some really interesting stuff. Think of it like a WAF for Nats plus a whole bunch of other stuff. And ([Time 1:21:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66f56eb5-68b9-425e-af0b-6970392c389b)) - **Importance of Maintainers** - Maintainers are the lifeblood of open source projects; losing them risks project viability. - Complex projects like NATS require extensive knowledge and tutelage to maintain effectively. Transcript: Derek Collison Running the server team. You know, they graciously took that from me so that I can do other things. You know, that person came in and was under our tutelage and specifically under my tutelage. And it still took them about eight months or so. So we were paying them and we were tutoring them. And most of the server's infrastructure was built by myself and someone named Yvonne. And we were tutoring this person. And it still took about eight months, almost a year become like, oh, I can go anywhere on the server code and be effective, right? Be productive. And so when you get statements that, oh, fork it, you guys go do your own thing and then we'll, you know, archive it or try to find new maintainers. Again, I want folks to kind of really think through that and say, is that the best outcome for the ecosystem? I don't think it necessarily is, but someone from the CNCF might say, yes, that's absolutely the way it's supposed to work. But what people are looking at to the CNCF around stability for projects and longevity, you know, if the maintainers leave, right, there's going to be some level of destruction for Sure. Depends on the project, but there's, you know, it's not going to be zero. And in some cases, you know, in our point of view, which people might disagree, Nats thrives when Cinedia thrives, right? Because we're driving all of that stuff. At least that's, you know, my opinion. And again, not all projects look like that and that's totally fine as well. But that's another one where I was like, that doesn't feel like it should be the only answer, right? That there could be a dialogue of how do we better support these types of projects? What if they're not necessarily a good fit as a foundation evolves? You know, what options are there for doing that? And again, I think prior to the dust-up, but also going forward, and again, we'll release a statement next week, probably about whenever the podcast goes out, around our commitment, You know, most people might not understand, you know, of our total R&D budget, 70% is going into open source. And it's funded by the VCs who fund Sanadio and it's funded by our customers. And the ones that can pay that aren't paying that are like, give me, give me, give me, you know, I'm entitled to this, you know, hey, get off your ass and change this thing for me, which we See every once in a while, like GitHub issues. ([Time 1:30:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a1729cbc-537f-4195-a7d8-b52bcbb5e105))