I can't stop thinking what happened when CASE tools, WYSIWIG, UML, Model Driven Architecture/Development, etc was pushed into devs. I know, it's a different phenomenon (that was a graphical visual push, this keeps the text).
We've had it on code as well. The factory pattern, workflow engines, SOA, lo-code, cloud computing, serverless, a billion different templating engines for js, js the right way, jQuery, not jQuery, SPAs, noSQL, graphQL, micro services, event sourcing and on and on.
Every couple of years there's something that if you aren't using you're apparently doing it wrong.
I think maintaining this AI code is going to turn out to be a nightmare and everyone will tone down on it, not letting agents run off on their, but we'll see.
My rules: if it's a person I interact everyday, private hello (hi, hey) is ok, and answered with equivalent. If we don't interact usually or have never, if I'm the one starting, then it's "Hi, I'm ..., the one responsible for ... We have this case ... etc etc.". I accept anything.
But, anyways, it's just life, don't know why people (even from my generation) are nervous these days.
I suppose Synadia will keep its plan to have NATS (or whatever it intend to call it) with a "business license". And, unless this episode wakes some people up, some damaged has been done (to the project/community).
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.
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.
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.
The sustainability of open source doesn't seem to come down to whether the product is open source or not.
As an example, Elastic was a $10B company in 2021 — the year they went dual license — with revenue of around $500-600m. They showed that you can build a huge business on something that's given away for free. I don't know anything about Synadia's financials. It's possible they're successful, but simply want more. It's possible they've not been able to build a sustainable business on NATS. Their commercial offering is basically support plus a closed-source control plane, which isn't exactly a big carrot when the alternative is $0.
I also wonder if there's any VC pressure happening here that could explain the sudden shift. Synadia raised $25m in 2024, and it may be that, one year later, the investors just aren't seeing the progress they were expecting.
Maybe - I wasn't making a point about open source particularly. But you can also have a few unusual examples in times of zero interest rates and they don't necessarily make useful reference points. Only the people in charge will know the whole story and how it relates to their company.
Partner list includes Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, InfoSys, KPMG, and Wipro. I think it’s fair to say that the generative capability of A2A is the generation of billable hours.
Yeah seeing that list is a red flag for me. Seems like a vehicle to attach their names to so those companies can pretend that they’re actually innovating in this space, rather than the usual mediocre services offerings.
As I understand it, it enables SaaS for Agents, along with the associated consumption and billing. All of those partners are going to have some kind of agent subscription for you to plug into your enterprise LLM of choice.
I see this as Slack bots 2.0. Maybe this will create real revenue opportunities where the original chatops didn't.
Adapting the capabilities of existing SAAS software for use by agentic AIs. This is not a small market. Anybody with any kind of software that does anything mildly valuable is going to look at ways to get in on the action via protocols like this. I know of several companies that have been exploring possibilities for this.
