[AlejandroM_E]

Hey Alex, Alejandro here :wave:

I was a bit surprised to see the announcement about making Redpanda open source (although very interesting for poking around!).

Question: are you, as a company (Vectorized) pursuing the same business model as the Confluent one? OSS Kafka, but paid official support, cloud, connectors and registry?

[agallego]

We had success with very large customers (enterprise) and also some success with finance company (looking for 0 data loss). The idea is that we can give the kafka API compat system with 10x lower tail latencies for free and still monetize the high end of the market.

I think there is a big shift when you have a single binary. i.e.: no one really complains from running ngix, etc because it's easy to get up and running.

so the gist we wanted to let everyone use it and reserve the right to be the only hosted redpanda provider.

[gtirloni]

> so the gist we wanted to let everyone use it and reserve the right to be the only hosted redpanda provider.

It seems totally fair to me. Good luck with this approach. I think yours odds are good.

[agallego]

also i'd note one more thing which is the WASM API is going to give us an opportunity to add more enterprise value.

i.e.: think GDPR compliance as long as your data streams are in JSON or some predefined format.

WASM basically allows us to push computational guarantees to the storage engine itself without a separate cluster.

[porker]

Is there a blog post or docs showing using WASM? I searched your site but couldn't find details.

I've failed to grasp if it's an "alternative plugin-engine" kind of system to extend Redpanda, or you're storing data as WASM and therefore it's executable (to take your example: GDPR compliant auto-expire if it's past a certain date).

[cookiesboxcar]

what does WASM mean in this context?

[sorenbs]

https://webassembly.org/

[cookiesboxcar]

Thanks -- I had never considered using webassembly in this way, so I thought it was something different.

[gunnarmorling]

It is not open-source, it is source-available. That's a perfectly valid choice, but the two approaches shouldn't be conflated.

[newswasboring]

I am guessing the difference is that

1. You can't just take this and make money from it

2. They don't accept or expect external inputs.

[agallego]

Hi there. Of course you can make money using it. The main restriction is to not run redpanda as a service. Otherwise have fun.

Its the same as cockroachdb in that regard

[ipsum2]

How can you run redpanda any other way? :)

[Lachedup]

feel free to embed, ingest customer data, run on a saas application. The only restriction is hosting redpanda as as service for other customers (Think AWS MKS)

If you have any questions or think your use may be confusing please reach out to us.

[_msw_]

If I am reading the fields of this implementation of BSL correctly, it will be open-source software in 10 years, when it converts to Apache 2.0, but not today. Until then, the license does not comply with the open source definition due to field of use restrictions.

[Lachedup]

" Our intention is to deter cloud providers from offering our work as a service. For 99.999% of you, restrictions will not apply - welcome to our community!"

[ensignavenger]

"For 99.999% of you, restrictions will not apply"

This is simply not true. The restriction applies to 100% of everyone using the software under the license.

If an alternative service provider can't legally host the service for me, I am restricted from selecting an alternative vendor if my needs converge from the available vendors offerings.

Further, it still isn't open source.

[smarx007]

Yes, all of us are bound by the terms alike but I think everyone understands it was meant as commercial and non-commercial use for 99.999% of you will not trigger the respective clauses in the license. And the post title literally says "Redpanda is now Free & Source Available".

[ensignavenger]

But there was at least one ancestor comment that said it was open source, and that is what I was replying to.