On February 21, 2024, the CNCF open source project Linkerd announced that it would no longer provide stable builds. The source code will continue to be under the OSI-approved Apache v2 open source license. Non-stable builds will also still be provided through the open source project. This change is about the release artifacts of stable builds only, not about code, governance, community, or anything else.

So why is there a push back and why was this so unexpected by the CNCF community at large?

Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, quite accurately describes itself as “a small but mighty team of software engineers, network programmers, and distributed systems experts.” That small but mighty team has been the sole force behind the open source project for quite some time, and as their CEO writes, “to do that work and maintain that quality, there’s only one sustainable path: we need the many, many companies around the world that are building their businesses on top of Linkerd to do their part to fund the project,” and he bluntly lays it all out (and on the line) in his expanded blog post here.

In a month where another CNCF project, Flux, backed by Weaveworks called it quits and folded up its tent (see Alex Richardson’s post), one has to wonder what is going on under the big tent of the CNCF and if there’s any way to stop a more seismic shift in the stability of CNCF projects.

Let’s take a step back and look at open source project health metrics for the Linkerd project.

Hello everyone, OSS Compass Project Deep Dive Insight Solution has been significantly updated again, making it quicker for you to understand information about open source project contributors! Come and check it out~

01 Contributor Name Search Function Launched

Open the project report page and click to enter the Project Deep Dive Insight Solution page of the project. In the contributor persona details table, you can now see a search box added at the header of the contributor column.

Just click this search button, enter the name of the contributor in the pop-up input box, and their information will immediately be displayed before your eyes.

From now on, there's no need to scroll through the screen, flipping through pages to find contributor information.

02 Contributor Avatar Display

Not only that, but we've also updated a friendly little detail—

In the contributor persona details table, you can now see the GitHub or Gitee repository avatar of each contributor!

This not only makes information retrieval more intuitive but also makes social interactions in open source projects more humanized.

03 One-Click Jump to Contributor's Repository Homepage

If you want to delve deeper into a contributor's open source contributions, you can simply click on their name to jump directly to their code hosting repository homepage.

Whether you want to further communicate and cooperate or just want to learn more about their work, this feature makes it easy to achieve.

04 This Is More Than Just a Feature Update

This update is not just about adding features; it's also an experience optimization for the open source community users.

We believe that through such thoughtful feature updates, we can help project managers and contributors collaborate more efficiently, making the ecosystem of the open source community more vibrant and healthy.

05 Experience It Now

What are you waiting for? Open OSS Compass now and experience the brand-new Project Deep Dive Insight Solution! Let's work together to make open source projects better and the future of the open source community brighter!

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a message in the comments section or contact us at any time. The OSS Compass team will continue to listen to your needs and provide more convenient and practical features for your open source projects.

Countless projects emerge in the open source world every day, but accurately assessing the health of an open source project has always been a challenge. Fortunately, we now have the open source project's health check doctor - OSS Compass, and recently its open source ecosystem evaluation system and SaaS services have undergone comprehensive upgrades! Last week, we introduced the Contributor Persona Model and Project Deep Dive Insight Solution. Now, let's take a look at the Three-Dimensional Evaluation System Graph and Compass Collaboration together.

Countless projects emerge in the open source world every day, but accurately assessing the health of an open source project has always been a challenge. Fortunately, we now have the open source project's health check doctor - OSS Compass, and recently its open source ecosystem evaluation system and SaaS services have undergone comprehensive upgrades! Let's take a look at the exciting updates together.

On the afternoon of December 13, 2023, amidst heavy snowfall in Beijing, OSS Compass Community 2023 Annual Meeting, co-organized by OSS Compass Community, Peking University, and Huawei Open Source, took place as scheduled. Despite the cold weather and slight traffic congestion, the enthusiasm of the experts remained unstoppable as they braved the snowy conditions, together igniting this feast of technology and art!

On the morning of December 13th, OSS Compass (hereinafter referred to as "Compass") community board held its fourth-quarter meeting at Peking University to explore the community's new value. The meeting was attended by 10 board members, including Minghui Zhou from Peking University, Xianping Tao and Liang Wang from Nanjing University, Hong Shu from OSChina, Hongwei Ma from Baidu, Kun Gao and Yehui Wang from Huawei, Zhongyi Tan from StarTogether Community, and Wenxuan Long from Checode attending the meeting in-person, while Shengxiang Zhang from OSChina participating in the meeting online. Three board members were absent due to unforeseen circumstances.

In the previous two articles, "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (1) - Evolution and Trends" and "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (2) - The Multidimensional Space of Evaluation Systems", I summarized three main directions of open source community evaluation and measurement: open source softwares, open source projects, and open source ecosystems. I also introduced a three-dimensional space of evaluation systems (Figure 1) and discussed four evaluation models in the intertwined space of "open source ecosystem" and "collaboration": Collaboration Development Index Model, Community Service and Support Model, Organizational Activity Model, and Community Activity Model (deployed in OSS-Compass). I used the example of PyTorch vs. TensorFlow to demonstrate the logical relationships between these models.

In this article, we will primarily focus on the intertwining between "open source ecosystem" and "people" that gave rise to two important evaluation models: Contributor Persona Model and Contributor Milestone Model. These two models are the results of collaborative research with Professor Liang Wang and his team of Nanjing University, and I sincerely appreciate the efforts they have put into this.

In my previous article, "Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (1) - Evolution and Trends", I summarized three main directions for evaluating and measuring open source communities: open source software, open source projects, and open source ecosystems. However, for the purpose of technical insight work, this is just the first step in a long journey.

As an engineer, I hope to see the emergence of a practical and feasible evaluation system with the following characteristics: the ability to help open source communities identify specific problems, assist people in discovering valuable open source communities, and predict industry trends.

In summary, this evaluation system should be practical, providing tangible value rather than being just an elusive idea.