Several companies have announced that they will be rallying around the Flux CD platform in the wake of ongoing uncertainty for the project, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced.
The continuous delivery tool faced a worrying future when Weaveworks, the employer of most of the project's maintainers, announced that it would terminate commercial operations.
Now, an array of companies have pledged backing for Flux CD, including Microsoft Azure and Edgecell, as well as additional “long-time Flux adopters” such as Cisco.
GitLab specifically announced its support for Flux CD and revealed in early 2023 that it would be integrating Flux with its agent for Kubernetes as the “recommended GitOps solution.”
This newfound commitment to Flux CD will help ensure the continued maintenance and development of Flux GitOps tool, as well as delivery for applications and platforms in a move that will transition the project to a “stronger and broader community.”
“This is a great example of the strength and resilience of our community and we look forward to Flux's continued evolution and growth,” Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, said.
Flux CD’s core maintainer, Stefan Prodan, commented on the project's future, expressing gratitude towards the CNCF while also calling on the community to help shape the platform’s future.
“We want to enable community members to take full ownership of Flux features and share the responsibility of feature stability and longer-term maintenance,” Prodan said.
Flux CD support highlights open source community spirit
Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, told ITPro the continued support for Flux CD will ensure the platform is “safeguarded” for the future, and highlighted the crucial role open source industry stakeholders have played during this disruption.
Backing from ControlPlane specifically, Amanda said, will help to ensure that all the project’s core maintainers are employed going forward, paving the way for a Flux CD future that is both open and commercially viable.
“A second open source business stepping in means that they understand how to manage a revenue model, which hopefully will be more successful this time and allow it to continue,” Brock said.
Flux CD’s turbulent period began when Weaveworks announced that it was terminating operations earlier this year.
Pressure from competitors in the space, such as CircleCI and Harness Labs, made financial sustainability difficult for the firm, ultimately resulting in a termination of commercial operations.
Prodan told Forbes that this incident highlighted the precarious nature of open source projects which rely heavily on a single organization or limited number of maintainers.
This is a question that’s marred the open source community in one way or another for some time, with projects often problematically dependent on individual organizations.
“When you look at any project, one of the biggest issues we've seen is single vendor products, where you have one company that's totally stacked in a product and they employ everybody who works in it,” Brock said. “That dependency is hugely problematic.”
Without a broad and healthy community surrounding a project, it becomes easy for a company to move out of open source while also threatening the stability of the project in general.
Examples of such open source departures can be seen in the likes of Redis, which recently announced its move to ‘source available’, or Hashi Corp, which moved to Business Source License (BSL) in 2023.
Flux CD’s survival is cause for celebration, Brock added, as it points to a resilient forward momentum in the open source community often unparalleled in other arenas.
“I think what we also see is the power of the continuum that open source offers that you won't ever see in proprietary,” Brock said.
Though businesses can navigate past business closures in the proprietary code landscape, Brock said it’s difficult to mimic the “momentum and continuum” of open source that the community has seen with Flux CD.
