Request for input: Narayana in a foundation?

The Narayana project has been very successful for many, many years and we are very grateful for the contributions that our upstream community give to us through discussing, reporting issues, and providing code contributions to help the project thrive.

I would like to share an update with our community that we are considering to move the Narayana project to a vendor-neutral software foundation. By doing this we can hopefully further expand our community and continue to improve openness and transparency in the project.

Important Considerations

Moving to a foundation is not a trivial task, so it’s critical that the choice we make is a net benefit to our community. To help ensure this, there are a number of key factors we’re looking at when evaluating what foundation would be the best fit:

1. Flexibility to continue shipping third-party components using a wide array of Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Open Source licences.
2. Maintain as much as possible our current release processes.
3. Retain independence in decision making, particularly on technical matters.
4. Ensure Narayana remains visible and recognizable within a foundation’s potentially larger portfolio of projects.
5. Ensure Narayana can make decisions based on technical merits, not foundation-imposed options.
6. Provide flexibility in using Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Open Source licences for Narayana.

Support and Alignment with Red Hat Values

Red Hat business leaders are fully behind this move. Red Hat is dedicated to participating in and supporting vendor-neutral collaboration projects, such as the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, and OpenJDK. We seek the same for Narayana.

Please let us know what you think

We invite members of our Narayana community, inside and outside of Red Hat to join the discussion in the community either on the blog, in our users forum (https://groups.google.com/g/narayana-users) or over on Zulip (https://narayana.zulipchat.com/).

Narayana and its relationship to Red Hat middleware strategy

Hi everyone,


You might have already seen that Red Hat announced significant changes to its middleware strategy last month (if not, please do check out the relevant “Red Hat Blog” article: Evolving our middleware strategy [1]) and so I want to speak a little to the change and its relevance to our Narayana project.


As you may know, Narayana is a part of a number of Red Hat products, in particular Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform product and so this makes the strategic decision relevant to the Narayana project. That said, a key point in that article from the “Red Hat Blog” with regards to our Narayana project is that all transitioning Red Hat technology will remain open source and continue to follow an upstream-first development model. So as well as the technology still relying on being able to upstream-first (in projects like Narayana), it’s also that this upstream should remain open source (you can find what open source means at Red Hat over here [2]). Not only is the Narayana source code open source, but moreover its project operates in an open source manner, exhibiting the principles of open source and gratefully benefits from a healthy community of users and contributors. This will help us to keep innovating in the area of transactions as we move forwards.


I will also take this opportunity to add a “Thank you” for being part of our Narayana community - I am excited to see the results of what we achieve together next!



Tom Jenkinson


[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/evolving-our-middleware-strategy

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source