Varnish Cache 8.0 should have been a straightforward release for one of the web’s most widely used and respected HTTP accelerators, which became a critical part of the web’s infrastructure, used by large organizations (I’ll just mention Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook, The New York Times, etc.), e-commerce platforms, and CDNs to speed up content delivery.
Sadly, it has been dominated by a bitter debate: the project will no longer be called Varnish Cache, but Vinyl Cache.
At the center of the controversy is the long-standing tension between the open-source community project and Varnish Software, the company that provides enterprise support and commercial products based on the cache engine.
For years, both shared the “Varnish” brand, which many felt blurred the lines between the community’s open development and the company’s business interests. What’s the result of all this?
In a message to the mailing list, Poul-Henning Kamp — Varnish’s lead architect and developer, and a prominent and longtime FreeBSD contributor — said:
I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software’s IP-lawyers is that nobody can use “Varnish Cache” in any context, without their explicit permission.
According to Kamp, the rename to Vinyl Cache was necessary to avoid legal and branding conflicts, while also giving the open-source project its own independent identity.
As part of this transition, a new Vinyl Cache Association has been created to handle governance, ensuring that future development is coordinated by a neutral body rather than tied to a single company.
We cannot live with that: We are independent FOSS project with our own name. So we will change the name of the project. The new association and the new project will be named “The Vinyl Cache Project”, and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the “Varnish Cache” name. The next release, in March will be under the new name, and will include compatility scripts, to make the transition as smooth as possible for everybody.
However, despite those explanations, many contributors and users argue that the decision was rolled out with little warning or consultation. For them, the “Varnish” name is more than just a label — it carries two decades (Varnish was first released in 2006) of recognition, adoption in major web infrastructures, and trust built through years of production use.
In the end, what should have been a technical release turned into a debate about governance, ownership, and the future direction of the project. Whether the community fully embraces “Vinyl Cache” remains to be seen. But enough about that.
Overshadowed by the naming dispute, Varnish 8.0 does ship with notable technical updates. These include improved parameter handling, refinements to VCL control, and more predictable logging behavior. Developers benefit from expanded VMOD functionality, extended test coverage, and updates to VSC counters.
Performance tuning has also been addressed, with adjustments to cache invalidation and request handling for more stable large-scale deployments. Security fixes and API improvements round out the release.
For in-depth technical details on all the new features in Varnish 8.0, see the release notes.
