The future direction of Go Micro

[asim]

As you all may have read, Go Micro has now gone back to being a personal project and is licensed under a noncommercial license for version 3. This is just another evolutionary step in its journey. Having now worked on this for 6 years, it felt as though Go Micro was useful as an open source framework but limited for the requirements of a larger company/product effort. Too much work was being conflated as a product requirement into Go Micro which added significant complexity.

The goal of Go Micro v3 is to be lighter, more inline with Go's principles of single purpose packages and to move out any external dependencies beyond the standard library to go-plugins so that we keep the core interfaces and implementations very small and lean for anyone to adopt. Go Micro should be useful not just for writing microservices but for actually building entirely new distributed systems. The predominant focus was previously the Cloud, today thought I think the move is towards something more on the edge, IoT, low memory footprint machines, raspberry Pi, etc. Why? Because the Cloud needs something more, and that's now the focus of Micro itself.

Go Micro is non commercially licensed because throughout its lifetime there was no financial contribution beyond a single corporate sponsor (who happened to be a friend). It was in that regard unsustainable and for this to have any sort of longevity I believe Go Micro must be dual licensed. What does this mean? Go Micro is non commercial by default. Useful for personal projects, non-profits, etc. Commercial licensing will require sponsorship (see here). That commercial licensing fees will go directly back into the maintenance where I select members of the community to take on pieces of work of the communities choosing. Maybe it doesn't go in that direction, who knows, but this is what I think must happen.

Thoughts welcome.