On March 25th, 2026, it was announced that Linux Foundation welcomed SQLMesh. This may have come as a surprise to many people, including me. As an active user of the OSS SQLMesh, this was surely great news.
What does this mean to the SQLMesh, dbt, and Fivetran communities though? I can only speculate, and none of these may or may not be accurate, but here’s a few things what this move can mean:
- SQLMesh will stay open, be governed by a neutral entity than a specific vendor. A huge plus for the OSS SQLMesh existing / future users.
- SQLMesh can position itself as a more open-source focused tool than dbt-core. This may attract more users in the near future.
- SQLMesh won’t be as part of the main products at Fivetran. It’s likely that, what SQLMesh offers will be baked into dbt and not the other way around.
All in all, SQLMesh joining the Linux Foundation is a great thing.
Not that you should know this, but I was asked to be a board member on the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and happily accepted the opportunity. I’m looking forward to seeing a positive change and more involvement from the open-source community on the SQLMesh project.