[rogerthis]

I'm not against this kind of move (Synadia's) by itself, but it seems too early. I've been following NATS for some time, and undeservedly, it hasn't taken off. I could find only two books; documentation is clean but I think it could be improved; blog posts, tutorials, videos are few and sparse in time; community tools are nil (from what I could find). A non-open source license is going to restrict adoption even more.

I recommended it to my clients every time it looked like a solution to the problem, but never been able to convince, due to the lack of community or big cloud sponsorship/offerings.

[atombender]

I think NATS is definitely popular. What is your standard for "taken off", though?

One thing I've learned in my career is that the field is broken into many smaller "bubbles". There is lots of software that flies under the radar if you're not inside the right bubble. Blogs and books aren't necessarily an accurate measurement of how healthy an open source project is.

Sure, there may be less noise around NATS than, say, Kafka. But there could be other explanations for that. From my perspective NATS is one of those well-engineered workhorse technologies that get the job without fuss or hype or (until now) drama. Some tools are just quiet because people are getting stuff done with it. I'm willing to bet it's got decent adoption in Fortune 500 companies.

I don't have any hard numbers. But if you wander into the NATS community Slack, for example (which isn't easy to find, admittedly!), you'll find that it's quite active compared to many other open source projects. Looking at Docker Hub, NATS has very healthy stats, beating prominent projects like Cassandra in terms of absolute pulls, and not far from Kafka.

One thing is certain, Synadia is not going to make NATS more popular by moving to a proprietary license.

[robertlagrant]

On the other hand, if they're pouring money into a project that doesn't make them enough money to make it worthwhile, that does seem unsustainable. Maybe NATS should get less popular but become an option in EKS/AKS/GKE that Synadia runs.