This is already out of date: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/05/01/cncf-and-synadi...

CNCF and Synadia have in the meantime issued a joint statement, having reached an agreement: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/05/01/cncf-and-synadi...

Synadia might not be very good at encouraging community involvement in development and has perhaps not made an effort. I've watched most of the videos they've posted on youtube, and they seem very proud of keeping total control of the project. I don't think there's anything fundamental to the NATS software that discourages community involvement; in fact, their code is extremely well written and easy to read in a developer friendly language (Go). However, there is something about how the project is actively run that seems to discourage community involvement. I've coincidentally been publicly documenting [1] my own surprising frustrations with trying to get involved during the last few months. Many other open source projects I'm involved with, e.g., Jupyter, SageMath, Cython, have much more welcoming governance structures, with regular welcoming developer meetings open to everybody, etc.

All that said, NATS is Apache licensed software, and any company is legally allowed to create and maintain a closed-source fork based on this. CNCF claims the trademark "NATS" and the domain name nats.io.

I have often wondered if the name "NATS" is an overly confusing name. People often think it means "Network Address Translation". I suspect changing the name to something else that involved PubSub or Queue or DB would be a net win in the longrun.

[1] https://github.com/williamstein/nats-bugs