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Comment by ryanisnan | Hacker News Reader

This is hugely frustrating. I will start by saying that I really empathize with Buoyant here. It seems hugely difficult to create an OSS project AND profit from it - these things seem truly best when done by a consortium of companies.

But as a user of linkerd, this is really really grating. Their new offering (BEL) would be around $14k/mo for our org (though they say discounts are available), with 90 days notice. That's a rather large chunk of change I didn't request in our 2024 budget, for a cost-category that didn't exist before.

Having no stability guarantees is, in my opinion, ridiculous.

This statement right here is wild:

> Upgrading between edge releases may involve breaking changes, and may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out.

I'm open to seeing how this fares, but right now, colour me furious.

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Hi, Linkerd person here. I don't use HN much these days but I was pointed me to your comment. First, thank you for your empathy. The truth is that as much as I would prefer it otherwise, this change is required for Linkerd's survival and future growth. In turn I have empathy for you—we've put you in a tough situation with this, and while with 7 prod clusters it seems fair to ask your company to help fund the project (maybe you disagree), it doesn't seem fair that the onus to push this change through your company falls on you. I know this is a consequence of how we designed this transition but I wish there were a way we could make this part better. FWIW, we do have a team of folks who are very good at working the process, and at your scale we have flexibility on terms and pricing, so I think we can make it easy in your specific situation. Some of the new features are focused on cost reduction so there is an opportunity to appease the budgetary gods.

In terms of the stability guarantees you point out, that has always been the case for edge releases. They contain the latest changes on main, and while we try to keep that as stable as possible, things can break. Everything is well-documented and we try our best to at least have you able to make an informed decision.

Hope that helps, I'm always up for a deeper chat if you want to send me an email. (At the bottom of the blog post.)

Looks more like an attempt to force people to pay for what should be an OSS project and goes against the spirit of CNCF. Guess that's another win for Istio, right? Have you guys consulted with CNCF to try offloading some costs of building and releasing "stable" OSS builds of LinkerD instead of forcing people into this weird arrangement? Something tells me CNCF wouldn't agree to this...

Yup.. CNCF seems to not like this change: https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/1262

Your Pricing page says $2k monthly PER CLUSTER. It doesn't say PER PRODUCTION CLUSTER.

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