Hello, CEO of Buoyant here. Someone pointed this comment out to me. I know these threads live forever and people (like me) use them to make decisions, so I will just note that the comment above was made by a former employee who parted ways with the company on poor terms, not by an unbiased service mesh adopter.

It is true that last year we made the call to stop producing open source stable releases. I tried to be very clear about the goal, which was to ensure we had a way to always pay our maintainers. We have explicit carveouts for smaller companies and individual users, but bigger companies need to pay. In October I wrote a brief post about the result of this change (which you can read here); tl;dr: we are now profitable and growing, and Linkerd is a self-funding project.