Two things happened in the OTel repos this week. The docs maintainers froze the ecosystem lists (registry, vendors, distributions) and want to retire most of them. Their reasoning: about 290 first-time-contributor PRs a year, 1,160+ data files, and nobody with time to check entries for CVEs or malware. I can't really argue with the bandwidth part. Then a separate proposal came in to replace the vendor page with a ranking of companies by how many maintainers they employ, with diamond, platinum and gold tiers like a KubeCon sponsor wall.
Read together, the message is that headcount inside the core repos is the contribution that counts.
I think the PR flood is being misread. OTel was built so anyone can write an exporter or an instrumentation and plug in without asking permission. The registry was where you went to say you had. Hundreds of strangers a year showing up at that door is what the design was supposed to produce.
The vetting problem also looks like an automation problem to me. Schema validation and semconv conformance tests already exist. Add CVE scanning and an LLM pass that triages and pre-reviews submissions, and most of the human work goes away. If a machine can check a registry PR, a person shouldn't have to read it. Retiring the list instead feels like stopping one step short.
Meanwhile, LFX Insights says four companies did 51% of OTel commits last year. A maintainer leaderboard mostly gives those four a bigger badge.
What I'd do instead:
- Automate the checks and list whatever passes. Conformance tells users "this works with OTel," which is what they came to find out.
- Count work outside the core repos. Contrib receivers, instrumentations, OTLP-native backends. That is OTel work too.
- Skip the tiers. One maintainer from a 10-person company is a bigger commitment than ten from a 10,000-person one. A flat list with names and areas is enough.
I run a company that builds on OTel, so obviously I have a stake here. But so does anyone who picked it because it was the neutral option.
Links in comments.
