Synadia Attempts To Reclaim NATS Trademark Back From CNCF
It has become almost commonplace to read about yet another company having regrets about open sourcing their flagship product and relicensing it under a semi-proprietary license. Yes, I’m looking at you, Hashicorp, MongoDB and Redis.
Now, though, Synadia, the original creator and donor of the NATS messaging system, is attempting the same old plan of switching NATS’ open source Apache 2 license to the Business Source License (BSL).
But, there’s a fly in the soup. You see, Synadia also wants the trademark and associated Intellectual Property back that it donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2018. And it wants to manage the project itself again.
Whoops.
700 Contributors
NATS is a widely used open source messaging platform for microservices, Internet of Things (IoT and Edge), and event streaming. Since then, it has grown under CNCF’s stewardship, benefiting from community contributions, financial support, and vendor-neutral governance.
CNCF claims more than 700 organizations have contributed to NATS, with the foundation funding security audits, legal work, and extensive marketing to help the project thrive.
Synadia has another take. According to Synadia founder and CEO, Derek Collison, “Synadia and its predecessor company funded approximately 97% of the NATS server contributions.” Therefore, “For the NATS ecosystem to flourish, Synadia must also thrive.”
That means, Collison added, “As a passionate believer in the open source model, I nonetheless recognize that sustainable OSS requires users who derive substantial value and have the means to support it financially,” which means relicensing future versions of NAT under the BSL.
So, in a first for the CNCF, Synadia has notified the CNCF of its intention to withdraw NATS from the foundation, demanding control over the nats.io domain and the nats-io GitHub organization’s key infrastructure, which has been managed by the CNCF for seven years.
Curiously, Synadia closed down its NATS server distribution repository last year, and the company’s main GitHub site still states, “We develop NATS, a CNCF project.”
Rather than just forking the project or launching a proprietary version under a new name — a usual industry practice — Synadia is seeking to “claw back” (CNCF’s words) the original project, its assets, and its brand. This approach, CNCF argues, undermines the foundational open source principle that donated projects become community property, protected from unilateral vendor control.
The heart of this dispute is the NATS trademark. CNCF requires all donated projects to transfer trademark ownership to the Linux Foundation to ensure vendor neutrality. However, Synadia never completed this transfer, despite accepting a $10,000 reimbursement from CNCF for trademark registration expenses.
Now, Synadia is asserting its trademark rights to reclaim the project, while CNCF has filed petitions to cancel Synadia’s trademark registrations and retain control over the project’s assets.
The CNCF claims:
Today, Synadia still refuses to follow through on its promise — despite years of commitment, financial support, and active stewardship from CNCF. And despite significant contributions from hundreds of other organizations and individuals.
Not only has Synadia broken its promise; it’s now weaponizing that broken promise against the community and foundation that helped make NATS successful, by asserting that its status as the current holder of record of the NATS trademark registrations entitles it to unilaterally take over project infrastructure and assets that have been community-owned for seven years.
Cancel the Trademark
CNCF has publicly condemned Synadia’s actions, emphasizing that open source foundations exist to prevent exactly this kind of vendor-driven rug-pulling. The CNCF has offered Synadia the option to fork NATS and build a proprietary offering under a new name but insists that the community-owned project, its name, and its infrastructure must remain under CNCF stewardship.
The CNCF is now calling for additional maintainers and support to ensure NATS continues as an open, community-driven project, regardless of Synadia’s involvement.
The foundation has also initiated a health check and legal actions to protect the project’s open source status. Finally, the CNCF is “asking the USPTO [Patent and Trademark Office] to cancel the… Synadia trademark registrations.”
This dispute has upset many people. William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, expects it to “end in a messy legal fight. This is not your run-of-the-mill OSS relicensing story; there seems to be some truly shady stuff going on.”
While Morgan understands where Synadia is coming from, “Making money from open source is hard. Especially in the CNCF, whose participants tend to treat projects as free products to be consumed, GitHub/Slack/etc project spaces as free helpdesks, and the word ‘vendor’ as an insult.” Morgan knows what he’s talking about. After Buoyant changed its Linkerd stable release policy last year, it took a lot of flak even though the company had played by the rules,
Morgan continued, “In the case of NATS, even ‘playing by the rules’ appears to be out the window. Every project that joins the CNCF has to assign the trademark to the Linux Foundation. This is the key mechanism by which the CNCF enforces its rules. The Apache v2 license that most projects use means that anyone can do (almost) anything with the code, including ship a relicensed version. But the trademark ownership means that the one thing you *can’t* do is call that relicensed thing the original project name.”
Other open-source projects and companies have a direct stake in this dispute. As Liam Randall, Cosmonic CEO and wasmCloud founder, blogged, “As longtime users of NATS.io, we were surprised to learn about the project’s proposed ‘exit.’ Like many in our community, we adopted and have actively contributed to NATS precisely because it has been a truly open source, foundation-led project. NATS has given us a lightweight, high-performance messaging backbone, and its CNCF stewardship has been a cornerstone of our confidence in its long-term stability.”
This conflict may become a test case for open source governance. Allowing a vendor to “take back” a donated project could set a dangerous precedent, undermining the trust and stability that foundations like CNCF provide. The outcome will have wide-reaching implications for the future of open source collaboration, project sustainability, and the balance of power between vendors and communities.
What’s Next? Well, the CNCF has vowed to continue supporting NATS as an Apache-2.0 licensed, community-governed project for as long as there is interest. Legal proceedings over trademarks and project assets are ongoing.
Meanwhile, the open source community is watching closely, as the resolution of this dispute may shape the rules of engagement for cloud native software for years to come.
(Update May 5, 2025: CNCF and Synadia have reached an agreement in which the open source NATS can continue to operate under the CNCF).
