Hydra's next chapter: independent stewardship

In 2019, while working at Facebook, I started Hydra to make it easier to build and configure complex applications. We released it as open source under the MIT license, and it grew far beyond its original setting.

Hydra became what it is because of its users, contributors, and maintainers. People adopted it in research labs, startups, large companies, and personal projects. They reported problems, proposed ideas, wrote plugins, improved the documentation, and helped shape the project over many years.

Today, I am happy to share that Hydra has moved from Meta stewardship to an independent home under the Hydra Ecosystem GitHub organization.

What the agreement covers

Meta and I signed an agreement transferring to me the Hydra-related rights and project assets specified in the agreement. These include:

• the Hydra GitHub repository;
• the hydra.cc domain;
• the specified Hydra packages published on PyPI;
• Meta's rights in the Hydra name and logo; and
• the specified project accounts used to operate Hydra.

The existing GitHub repository was transferred rather than replaced with a fork. This preserved the repository's history, issues, pull requests, releases, and community context.

Alongside Hydra's move, I will move OmegaConf, currently hosted at omry/omegaconf, into the Hydra Ecosystem organization so that Hydra and its configuration foundation have a shared long-term home.

What is not changing

Hydra remains under the MIT license. The transfer does not include copyright in Meta's historical code contributions. That code remains part of Hydra under the MIT license, with applicable license and copyright notices preserved. The transfer changes stewardship and project control without changing the ownership history of existing contributions.

No immediate action is required from Hydra users. Existing packages continue to work, and existing GitHub links redirect to the new location. You can update your local Git remotes to the new organization at your convenience.

What independent stewardship means

The move gives Hydra a clear home outside Meta for future project decisions, including governance, releases, infrastructure, security, and community processes. It also keeps the door open to a future foundation or another durable organizational home if that becomes the right choice.

When I left Facebook at the end of 2021, a small team continued to maintain Hydra. Over time, as its members moved on, that team dispersed and development slowed.

Adoption, however, continued to grow. GitHub now reports more than 40,000 public repositories as direct dependents of Hydra. The new Hydra Landscape is a curated directory of more than 100 applications, frameworks, tools, plugins, and learning resources. It offers a window into that much larger ecosystem, not an exhaustive survey of it.

In recent months, I have returned to actively maintaining Hydra and OmegaConf. The number of open issues and pull requests has already fallen substantially in both projects. Work on Hydra 1.4 is underway, and it is already available as a development release. There is still much to do, but maintenance is active again.

Practical transition work remains. I am finalizing release publishing and moving the remaining Meta-dependent infrastructure, contribution, and community processes to project-controlled systems. Security reports can now be submitted privately through GitHub.

The contribution process deserves particular care. Hydra historically used Meta's contributor license agreement. Going forward, Hydra will use a project-controlled CLA. I will publish the CLA together with details of the new process once both are finalized. Pull requests already open during the transition will be handled individually.

What comes next

Completing Hydra 1.4 is the next major priority. More broadly, I intend to keep the project actively maintained and responsive to the community.

If you are feeling adventurous, try the Hydra 1.4 development release and report any problems you find.

This transition is not a product relaunch or a change in Hydra's purpose. It is a change in stewardship that gives the project a cleaner and more sustainable foundation for its next chapter.

I am grateful to Jon Janzen, Jonathan Torres, and the people at Meta who helped work through an unusual transfer. I am also deeply grateful to Hydra's maintainers, contributors, and users for building and sustaining the project.

I look forward to continuing that work and giving Hydra and OmegaConf a stable, active home for the years ahead.