OPA maintainers join Apple; OSS community to maintain Styra Products

Apple has hired the core maintainers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) and several Styra engineering team members, leading to the open-source community taking over the maintenance of Styra's commercial products under the CNCF. This shift raises questions about OPA's commercial offerings like Styra DAS, which may face challenges in terms of innovation and enterprise support, though OPA itself remains a stable CNCF project. This scenario is reminiscent of Apple's 2015 acqui-hire of the FoundationDB team, whose technology is now primarily developed for Apple's internal needs. As a result, organizations relying on Styra's commercial tools might consider alternatives such as Oso, which focuses on application-level authorization with a tailored approach to permissions models like RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC. Oso positions itself as a viable, developer-focused, and commercially supported alternative, particularly for teams needing to implement specific permissions models rather than general-purpose policy engines.