Hacker News Reader

Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

Because they like community contributions to their stuff, so "open source" it for that, but don't want their competitors benefiting from the initial work they did. Which I understand.

Kafka was already FOSS, so anyone can vendor it, what Confluent has that gives it an edge is the ecosystem of tools that make Kafka more useful, e.g., Kafka Connect connectors, Schema Registry, kSQL etc.

(Although I'm of the opinion the last one exists mainly to dazzle engineering VPs. The abstraction leaks rather quickly IMO, just using Kafka Streams or Flink from the get go)

When I was at RH, we couldn't ship or bundle or provide any of the above in our FOSS projects, because of that licence, so hey, it was working I guess.

View on HN

> Because they like community contributions to their stuff, so "open source" it for that, but don't want their competitors benefiting from the initial work they did. Which I understand.

The distinction between competitors and community contributions is false. Why should the publishers be entitled to exclusive monetization of the contributions of their community, and why should their community be denied the right to monetize a product they contributed to? The ability to share the wealth is why the open source movement works.

This approach stems from a position wherein the publishers view themselves as separate and privileged from their community, which is valid if you are the only entity investing in the software, but unjust if the community is an active participant in the software's development.

The mainstream view on OSS is often good for the original publisher, in that an organization which monetizes their software then has access to more resources with which to contribute back to the software -- particularly in the presence of a copyleft license to enforce this behavior. The original publisher is then able to benefit from a larger and more consistent workforce developing the project with them.

I agree with you on that one also (and I see that Confluent has retracted their definition of it as OSS - it's now "source available").

I was just saying that I can understand why they use that licence from a "just IPOed and the MBAs are hungry" POV - it ensures that they're the only managed Kafka vendor that can also provide a managed Kafka Connect / Schema Registry / KSQLdb, it's a significant point of difference in the market, because aside from that, what differentiates Confluent from AWS MSK, or Aiven, or Instaclustr, or RH's managed Kafka etc. etc. etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com