Fluent Bit Maintenance Policy

This document outlines the maintenance strategy and version support for Fluent Bit.

Active Branches and Maintainers

Branch	Version	Status	Maintainer	Notes
`master`	v4.1 (development)	Active development	Eduardo Silva	All new features and bug fixes land here first
`4.0`	v4.0.x	Maintenance only	Hiroshi Hatake (@cosmo0920)	Critical fixes and safe backports only. Maintained until Dec 31, 2025

As of July 2025, active development has moved to Fluent Bit v4.1 (tracked in the master branch).

v4.0 has entered maintenance mode, now maintained by Hiroshi Hatake (@cosmo0920), a long-time Fluent Bit contributor and core developer.

Maintenance for v4.0 will continue until December 31, 2025, which is three months after the official v4.1 release.

✅ Security patches
✅ Critical bug fixes
✅ Low-risk enhancements that unblock adoption (e.g., OpenTelemetry improvements, performance tuning)

⚠️ All changes must first be merged into master before being cherry-picked into the 4.0 branch by the maintainer.

v4.0 releases will continue on an as-needed basis depending on urgency and impact.

If you're submitting a fix or feature relevant to v4.0: