License Changes for Confluent Platform

This is a really negative trend for Open Source, and I hope it runs its course and dies out soon. License proliferation, bizarre "field of use" restrictions, blurring the line between what is open and what isn't, none of this stuff is a win for anybody. If you want to make something proprietary, make it proprietary, call it proprietary, and let that be the end of it. If you want to make something Open Source, then make it Open Source and don't try to straddle the line.

Speaking as someone who makes a living contributing to open source, it&#x27;s a frustrating trend that the major cloud providers (Amazon being the worst offender) have decided that it&#x27;s in their interests to take open source projects and never contribute back or even interact with the community.<p>It&#x27;s less clear to me whether this is rational on their part - whether the incentives have actually changed. It&#x27;s generally been in companies&#x27; best interest to contribute back to open source projects they are building products around, because:<p>You need to contribute to projects to influence the direction of them.<p>And you <i>will</i> need to make changes or fixes to your version of the project, and the maintenance cost of an upstreamed patch is much lower than the cost of maintaining an ever-growing stack of custom patches.<p>I&#x27;ve seen companies before make the bet that they are better off forking a large project because they can &quot;move faster&quot;. And it is true for the first year or two, but after a while the burden of keeping up with the backporting of changes from upstream takes multiple engineers spending large chunks of their time to keep up with.<p>In some cases you might be able to offset this just by hiring more engineers, but how many of the best engineers really want to work on backporting changes to a bizarro fork of an open source project? I suspect this is the bet the cloud providers are making - that they can grow the product fast enough to the point where they can throw money at it. We&#x27;ll see how that works out for them.

Hi all, I&#x27;m Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent and author of that blog post. I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions.

I kinda expected this after recently revealed AWS Managed Kafka. AWS can afford to release half baked products because platform inertia and that will easily cannibalize whatever traction SaaS offerings of Elastic, Kafka, Mongo etc has.

The submission title is misleading (“License Changes for Confluent Platform (Kafka)” at time of commenting) - the license changes do not apply to Kafka itself, as the article specifically states.

ScyllaDB&#x27;s Dor Laor weighs in with his opinion on the new Confluent license: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scylladb.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;15&#x2F;saas-vs-oss-fight-or-flight-round-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scylladb.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;15&#x2F;saas-vs-oss-fight-or-fli...</a>

Is aws now in violation of the license if they ever upgrade kafka version?