[sherifnada]

Hi, Airbyte engineer here.

All connectors and the core functionality of Airbyte will _always_ be open source and free to use. You will always be able to download and operate an instance of Airbyte, containing all connectors and ELT features (whether for personal projects or business operations in your company) for free.

However, there are some things that we might offer as a monetized product in the future, such as:

* enterprise compliance requirements (E.g SOC2)

* SSO

* Hosting Management

Hope this clarifies the direction we’re taking.

[dal]

No, this was exactly my point.

It is a company behind and not a foundation backed by multiple interests. So profit is the main driver. You want to have it open enough so you get community maintained connectors. This pattern is common.

If somebody were to implement those features you described there and commit to the repo under the BSD license would you merge it?

[jeanlaf]

In all honesty, in that particular case, we'd honestly think about merging it. If that happens, we're facing 2 options. Either we merge it, and at that point the real business model for our business is about hosting, management, support, SLAs, etc. Or we don't, and that contributor could very well publish it in another repo. And then, what's the point?

We call this type of business model open core. It is the same one as Confluent or DBT. Without those companies, there would have been nobody to create those open source projects and get them to a place of value for a maximum number of companies. Kafka's impact goes well beyond Confluent's customer base. Similarly, our goal is to solve the data integration problem for every company or project, even if we only convert a small % of them as customers for us. That's why we won't be focusing on any premium features for at least a year and possibly 2. Hope that makes sense to you.