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I'm one of the original Kafka creators and am an evil corporate shill at Confluent :-) That was a super silly discussion and I'd be annoyed reading it too. It does not, however, represent any kind of "move away from open source" by Confluent. The discussion was not actually about open source vs non-open source but rather around how to curate the Kafka ecosystem. Currently there are several hundred independent open source projects that act as connectors, clients, monitoring tools, processing libraries and frameworks, etc. Some of these are fantastic and active communities, some are built by companies that use Kafka, some by vendors that use Kafka in a product in some way. This has always been the structure of this ecosystem, since even before we moved Kafka into Apache. These projects are mostly Apache licensed and on github, but mostly not part of the ASF. You can see a subsample of them here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Ecosystem The proposal from a group at Hortonworks was to duplicate one of the modules Confluent built, a REST layer, and build a new one in the main project. I don't think this is inherently a bad thing to do, but there wasn't really any concrete rationale...there was no complaint with the code in that module, nor any kind of complaint with the governance, nor any complaint with the community, etc. As a result a lot of us at Confluent kind of felt it was an odd exercise that had more to do with Hortonworks' policy of only shipping Apache projects, which in turn comes out of the weird fractious politics of the Hadoop ecosystem. The reality is that policy just doesn't fit with the Kafka ecosystem as it stands today. |