Today I'm sharing some big news: Sidero Labs - the company behind Talos Linux and Omni - has been acquired by Yardi. I wanted you to hear it directly from me, because you're the reason this company exists: the people running Talos in production or at home; contributing to it on GitHub, and building fleets on Omni.
We started Sidero Labs on a simple conviction: that Kubernetes could be simplified with an operating system underneath it that was designed to be secure, minimal, and open source, without trading away any of the three. Talos took that conviction from an idea to a platform that tens of thousands of clusters now run on. That commitment to being open source doesn't change, and it isn't changing because of this acquisition.
Why Yardi
Yardi was running Talos Linux in production, and they liked the architecture, and saw great potential - a real part of why they wanted to bring us in. They also happened to be based in Santa Barbara (where Sidero Labs originated).
From our side, we wanted to have an answer to the enterprises that tell us "You're too small and risky for us to adopt, even though you have the best technology," or those that ask "What if you get acquired by a company that wants to kill off your technology?" Now we have the answers: we are now part of a 10,000+ employee organization, that is profitable, and that is committed to our products.
A question you may be thinking: are we about to get squeezed by someone optimizing for a quick return? No. Yardi was built by Anant Yardi over 40 years as a bootstrapped, profitable, privately held company - no outside investors, no exit clock running in the background. Anant is a long-horizon operator with a track record of bringing companies in and letting them keep building. That's the kind of owner an open-source company can actually plan around.
What changes is what we can build next. Joining Yardi gives Sidero Labs the backing and resources of an established enterprise software company. That is already showing up in the roadmap: today we're announcing Talos Hypervisor, a new capability that extends Talos beyond Kubernetes and exists directly because of this partnership.
As Anant Yardi, founder of Yardi, put it:
"Talos has redefined modern infrastructure by demonstrating that security, simplicity, and openness can coexist. We intend to keep it that way and to give the team and community that built it the resources to finish what they started."
Another example of how the Yardi resources will help us - we will be announcing not only a U.S. TalosCon event to take place early next year, but we will also be waiving the attendance fee for the Amsterdam TalosCon, if you repost our announcement tomorrow. Neither of which we could have afforded to do as a standalone company.
I know an acquisition announcement raises questions before it answers them, so let me get straight to the ones I'd be asking myself.
What this means for you
Is Talos Linux still open source?
Yes, unambiguously. Talos Linux remains fully open source under the MPL-2.0 license - same repos, same license. That's the foundation everything else at Sidero Labs is built on.
Will the product roadmap change?
The core commitment - building the best and most secure operating system for Kubernetes - isn't changing. What is changing is that we're building more: Talos Hypervisor, which we announced today, extends Talos into virtualization and is a direct result of joining Yardi.
Does Sidero Labs still operate independently?
Yes. Sidero Labs continues to operate as a standalone company, with the same team making the same day-to-day decisions about the product, close to the community and customers who depend on it. We are hiring more Sidero Labs employees directly. Feel free to apply!
Does this change how the open-source community works with Sidero Labs?
No. Same repositories, same contribution process, same commitment to Talos as a genuinely open project - issues, PRs, and design discussions all continue exactly as they have.
To our customers, our contributors, and our team: thank you for building this with us. This is a vote of confidence in the path we've been on, and I'm looking forward to what we build next.
Justin Garrison
Hannah Augur