[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.