Envoy’s open source community is amazing. I looked the other day, and at least on GitHub, just from a code contribution perspective, we’re almost at 600 contributors. Which for a fairly low-level C++ project… that is freakin’ incredible. It just blows my mind. And then you look at all of the vertical products and all these other things that are built on top…

There are many factors that contributed to this success, but one thing I did early on stands out as the most important thing I could’ve done. In this post I share my secret with you.

When we talked with Dan Kohn on The Changelog #314 about the CNCF landscape and trail map, he made it clear that graduated projects are a good first choice for adoption at each stage along the 1 through 10 trail map trail. In this case, Envoy is poised to be the “happy path” choice for 5. Service proxy, discovery, & mesh.

…the CNCF projects in general somewhat represent a happy path, where we can confidently say, hey, if you choose our graduated incubating projects, we know they all work. We know that there’s real end-users adopting them. We know that there’s vendors out there who are eager to support them, your issues are gonna get responded to … it’s a pretty safe bet to engage and get invested in those communities. — Play The Changelog #314 at 1:03:48 or read the transcript

In response to the post from Paul Dix on the misunderstandings going on around Redis and the Common Clause license — Matt Klein tweeted:

Won’t defend Redis Labs, this is a dead end move, but there needs to be more recognition that the economics of OSS are fundamentally broken.

In his post he starts by saying…

I want to provide a long form discussion of my two Twitter threads as this topic is nuanced and quite interesting. Note: this post is heavy on opinion and light on facts/references backing up those opinions. Thus, preface everything that follows with “IMO.”

Matt goes on to share some history of open source software and his opinions on modern expectations of software being free and open, startups and open source, and who pays…