Thoughts on Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Open Source

Earlier today I signed the annual contract for Altinity’s silver membership in Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aka CNCF. I sign a lot of contracts but this one is special. It feels like signing up for lwn.net, except a leetle pricier. (Note to self: have to renew that too after writing this article.)

Open source history goes back decades. If there’s one thing we’ve learned during that time it’s this: foundations ensure the building blocks of system software remain free to all users. I can’t imagine building any production system today without projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, and many, many others. The Linux Foundation and CNCF host all of them. Besides the Apache Foundation, it’s hard to think of two organizations that have contributed more to keeping critical software stable and open. 

Altinity is especially grateful to all three foundations because our software stack is built using open source projects from each one. Those projects in turn enable our economic model, which is to operate and support open source analytic stacks based on ClickHouse^Ⓡ. The query engines, operators, monitoring and other basics that user apps depend on are fully open. We believe our users should have the same freedoms for their analytic stacks that we enjoyed when building our management stack. So far it’s worked out pretty well for everybody. 

The CNCF is especially on our minds this week, because of the KubeCon North America Conference in Salt Lake City. KubeCon is where the Kubernetes community gathers for a celebration of cloud native geekiness unrivaled anywhere on the planet. Our dev advocate Josh Lee is there delivering multiple talks about observability, ClickHouse, and other fun topics. 

Open source is all about paying it forward. We’re proud to support the Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. There’s only one thing that is better: writing open source yourself! We have a number of open source projects at Altinity. I hope you use them, and I hope at least one of them will end up in a foundation! 

p.s., Here’s a picture of our contract. Jim Zemlin already signed it. I’m impressed it was so fast, because he must be very busy at KubeCon. I also took a break from writing and renewed my lwn.net subscription. They seemed very grateful. 😉