Apple has hired the core maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA), including Teemu Koponen, Tim Hinrichs, and Torin Sandall, as well as several members of the Styra engineering team. As part of this move, Styra’s commercial products around OPA will be maintained by the open-source community under the CNCF.
With Styra’s commercial offering being sunset, this is an opportunity to consider OPA alternatives and in particular evaluate Oso as an alternative to OPA for app-level authorization.
What this means for OPA
OPA itself remains in good standing as a CNCF project. The community will continue to steward the engine, ensuring continuity for existing users. However, with the founding maintainers of Styra joining Apple, the commercial offerings around OPA (such as Styra DAS) face an uncertain future in terms of roadmap, innovation, and enterprise support.
This is not the first time that Apple has acqui-hired the commercial team behind an open source software project. In 2015 they hired the FoundationDB team and sunset the commercial offering. While Apple re-released FoundationDB in 2018 as open source software, the Apple maintainers develop the technology primarily for Apple’s internal use cases. Apple employees are the primary maintainers, and FoundationDB adoption has declined, with DB-Engines ranking it 197 among all database technologies.
Oso as an alternative
For teams evaluating their options in light of Apple’s hiring of the OPA maintainers, Oso provides an alternative for application-level authorization. Unlike OPA, which was designed as a general-purpose engine for infrastructure policies, Oso focuses specifically on application permissions rather than being a general-purpose policy engine. This makes Oso well-suited for teams that need to implement permissions models, like role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), or relationship-based access control (ReBAC).
We have a more detailed article on OPA alternatives as you navigate this change, and you can also book time with an engineer to discuss your options.
Frequently asked questions
Did Apple acquire Styra?
According to the official announcement on the OPA blog, Apple hired the founding maintainers of OPA and several members of the Styra engineering team. This implies that Apple “acqui-hired” the Styra team to get access to the expertise of the key OPA maintainers.
What happens to OPA?
OPA remains an active CNCF project. The open source community continues to maintain and evolve it.
What happens to Styra’s commercial products?
With the original team now at Apple, Styra’s enterprise offerings (like DAS) will no longer be actively developed in the same way. The community may maintain them, but organizations should not expect the same commercial roadmap or enterprise-level support.
I already use OPA—should I be worried?
No, your existing OPA deployments will continue to function. But if you rely on Styra’s commercial tools for support or advanced features, you may want to explore OPA alternatives like Oso.
Where does Oso fit in?
Oso provides a stable, developer-first, and commercially supported alternative to OPA for application-level permissions.
Frequently asked questions
