[mananaysiempre]

From WarpStream’s (the forker’s) communications, I can’t tell if this is a hard fork or if they intend to pull changes and keep plugin compat. Perhaps they don’t yet know themselves, which would be nonideal but understandable under the circumstances. And I think that’s the only way we could really measure “trying not to fork” here, so saying that they had tried not to fork before eventually doing so sounds confused on their part.

On the other hand, I am saying all of that because I don’t think not forking at all is really an option in this situation. When the new maintainer is willing to relicense [EDIT: parts of] a piece of FOSS whose previous maintainer they acquired, when they are further trying to impose some weird Orwellian retcon on the name of said piece of FOSS and deleting all of its older resources, this seems to me like a degree of active hostility that wouldn’t be wise to tolerate, and the correct attitude would be “fool me twice, shame on me.” So a fork it is, now we’re just haggling over the hardness.

[agallego]

you may have not read the blog post i wrote. the engine remains MIT because we had customers that had embedded this in their app and it made sense to keep that. it is 100% about not having to call it "redpanda x" https://redpanda.com/blog/redpanda-connect

at the end of the day, there is plenty of ppl that are making money on this that is not us and that's cool too. we just need to retain the brand of the code we maintain. that's really the thing that matters.

[csande17]

> it is 100% about not having to call it "redpanda x"

It sounds frivolous, but these kinds of trademark shenanigans are a pretty big deal IMO. Mozilla's trademark policies already push the boundaries of what's acceptable in open source--people maintain forks like GNU IceCat just to get around them. Redpanda's forced rebranding goes a lot farther, and personally, it would make me think twice about using your stuff in anything I ship.

> we just need to retain the brand of the code we maintain. that's really the thing that matters.

This is... not really possible with most open source licenses? It's probably possible for you to ban me from using the name "Benthos", but I could almost certainly take your code and distribute it as "Frank's No-Name Blob Thingy" if I retained your copyright notices and license text. I mean that's what this fork is doing, after all.