Less than a week after IBM announced that it was donating three open source AI tools to the Linux Foundation, FOSS Force learns that Kubernetes-focused Mirantis is the process of donating a couple of project to CNCF.
This year, March appears to be “donate your project to the Linux Foundation month.”
Last week at the inaugural All Things Open AI event in Durham, North Carolina, IBM announced that it was donating three AI tools it’s built to the Linux Foundation, where they’ll probably end up in the AI and Data Foundation, according to Sriram Raghavan, IBM’s VP of IBM Research AI who broke the news.
Just a week later, FOSS Force has learned through an advance look at a press release, that Silicon Valley-based Mirantis is donating two Kubernetes-based projects, k0s and k0smotron, to LF’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation as Sandbox projects. The company intends to officially announce the donations on April 2 at the Linux Foundation’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 event in London.
“Sandbox” is the entry level for all projects accepted by CNCF. Eventually Sandbox projects move on to become Graduated or Incubating projects.
“Joining the Sandbox program underscores our commitment to making Kubernetes more accessible and efficient for developers and operators everywhere,” Jussi Nummelin, senior principal engineer at Mirantis, said in the as yet unreleased press statement. “Becoming a CNCF Sandbox project enables us to gather invaluable feedback, foster collaboration, and refine k0s and k0smotron to better serve the cloud-native community. We’re excited to collaborate with the CNCF community and scale k0s’ impact on cloud-native infrastructure.”
In true open-source fashion, giving the project away also helps Mirantis, in this case to develop a community of outside developers — and users — around the project, which should payoff for Mirantis on several levels down the road.
According to CNCF, k0s has already been onboarded, accepted by CNCF on January 21 at the Sandbox level, so the announcement at KubeCon will only serve to make it official.
Initially developed by the Lens IDE project that Mirantis acquired in 2020, k0s crunches a fully functional Kubernetes platform into a tiny 160-300 MB package — not as small as Rancher’s k3s, but small enough to make it ideal for deployments anywhere where storage is limited, say like edge locations.
Although the software is 100% upstream Kubernetes, it’s much easier to install than full-fledged Kubernetes, and maintenance is much easier, as the core upstream Kubernetes components are self-contained. This makes it possible for users with little expertise to quickly be installing clusters like seasoned pros.
k0smotron, launched only a couple of years back, extends k0s with production-grade multi-cluster management, simplifying large-scale provisioning and hybrid deployments while reducing operational complexity and enhancing flexibility. It’s basically a set of Kubernetes controllers that’s used to run and manage multiple Kubernetes cluster control planes as pods within a single Kubernetes cluster… or as Mirantis noted when it introduced the product, “Kubernetes in Kubernetes.”
Although Mirantis’s contribution of k0smotron to CNCF isn’t yet a completely done deal, FOSS Force has been assured that the wheels are already in motion and that the official announcement will be made at KubeCon Europe.
Mirantis is no stranger to open source. Although the company does develop and release some proprietary software, the majority of its software is released under open source licenses and it’s widely considered to be an open-source company. It’s also an active contributor to more than 50 open source projects, many of which are not related to its core cloud native business.
It’s also an industry leader in the cloud-native arena, especially when it comes to Kubernetes and other container technologies. It also contributes upstream to many open source cloud native projects, including Kubernetes, Helm, Kubelinter, and others.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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