[winteriscoming]

I am not associated with the Kafka dev team or Confluent in any way but have been using Kafka since their 0.7.x days. Speaking of their open source commitment so far, I haven't seen any kind of problems in the way they deal with the community. They have been open to bug fixes, feature enhancements and other contributions.

Many of the Confluent employees you see currently, started off by contributing to the open source code and still do, from what I can see.

>> There was a recent thread about their open source status

I am not sure which thread you are talking about, but if it is that thread which involved adding REST server within Kafka core then I completely back what many of the Confluent employees and other community members decided on that topic. From what I could see in that thread, the whole reason of "we should bring in REST server within Kafka core" was not related to technical reasons but hypothetical reasons like "there's a project out there which already supports this REST feature but what if they don't like my contributions and don't allow me to push features that I like into that repo". That proposal of bringing in the REST server within Kafka core was, IMO, rightly rejected but at the same time, the users were allowed to state the technical reasons why they want that feature within core.

Given any production usable project that has a large user base, discussions and decisions like these are common and that doesn't essentially mean they are moving away from open source. Overall, I have high respect to many of the members of Kafka dev team, many of whom are currently employed at Confluent, for the way they have so far dealt with suggestions to enhancements in the project.

Of course, Confluent builds on top of Kafka and has/will have they own commercial interests, so some of the features that they develop might/will be commercial.

[pfarnsworth]

Yes, I think that's the one but my biggest takeaway from what I remember was "Apache is okay but..." I remember reading about half a dozen Confluent employees towing the party line and parroting the exact same argument, about how being under Apache was stifling their innovation. And yet Kafka is thriving under Apache, so their arguments smelled fishy as hell.

It sounds like they are setting up the foundation to pull something like what Oracle did with MySQL, and try to take control after countless outside helpers turned the product into something rock solid.

[SEJeff]

There are plenty of outside helpers, but the heavyweights doing the overwhelming majority of the work are either Jay, Jun, or Neha and/or work for one of those 3... All at Confluent. I've met both Jay and Jun in person, and watched Neha present @ MesosCon last year. If they're doing something with tech, it is going to be good.