Project name

nats

Concern

There are health concerns around the NATS project that require review and discussion:

• Some NATS maintainers are interested in leaving CNCF which would mean archival of the project: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/NATS.io%20Maintainer%20Minutes%20-%20March%202025.pdf
• A single vendor unfortunately wants to re-license and take control of the project: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/Proposal%20to%20exit%20NATS%20from%20CNCF.pdf https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/Cease%20and%20Demand%20Letter%20from%20Synadia%20Counsel.pdf

The project may need some deeper governance review/improvements, a call for broader maintainership and more. From my POV outside of the legal circumstances above that CNCF leadership is managing, this reminds me of the time Cortex was forked by a single vendor into a new project with a lot of maintainers moving to the new project under a new name, we had a call in CNCF for additional maintainers and it worked out in the end: https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/qa-with-our-ceo-about-grafana-mimir/

Prior engagement

No response

Additional Information

https://github.com/cncf/foundation/tree/main/documents/nats