Community Future - Proposal to Move to the CNCF Sandbox

Summary

MetalLB was originally written by Dave Anderson and was later transitioned to a team of maintainers that currently maintain the project. The maintainers come from different companies and desire a neutral home that can own assets of the project, such as the domain names.

This proposal is for MetalLB to apply to become a CNCF Sandbox Project.

Motivation

While Dave Anderson is no longer actively involved with the project, he still owns the MetalLB domain names. When discussing what to do with them, transferring them to an individual or the employer of one or more of the maintainers doesn't seem like an ideal solution. An alternative which is becoming increasingly common in the open source ecosystem is to use an open source foundation as a neutral home for those assets.

The CNCF seems like the most natural foundation home for MetalLB given its coupling to the Kubernetes project, which is also part of the CNCF.

Goals

• Align with other CNCF ecosystem projects in terms of policies and processes.
• Transfer assets to a neutral third party (i.e. domains).
• Gain more visibility in the CNCF ecosystem to attract others who may be interested in contributing to MetalLB development and maintenance.

Non-Goals

• No changes to the MetalLB code are in scope of this proposal. This proposal is only about the community future.
• No changes to committer processes are proposed here. We already have a documented process for adding and removing maintainers.

Proposal

Apply to become a CNCF Sandbox project.

The Goals section discusses some of the immediate changes we should expect, but some of the other services provided by the CNCF may be very beneficial to MetalLB in the future. The CNCF web site does a nice job discussing what services they offer projects on the Services for CNCF Projects page.

Design Details

Work Items

• (russellb) Write this proposal.
• (everyone) Provide feedback on initial proposal, reach consensus.
• (russellb) If approved, apply through the proposal form.
• (danderson) If accepted, transfer project assets as appropriate to CNCF. This includes transferring domains to CNCF, and likely MetalLB trademark assignment to the CNCF. See the CNCF IP Policy.
• (russellb) Work with CNCF on any other CNCF onboarding tasks required, such as adding CNCF info to the web site footer.

Alternatives

Don't Apply to the CNCF Sandbox

This alternative is mostly the status quo, except we would need to decide which individual or maintainer Dave should transfer domains to.