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The only time I have an issue with this sort of setup is when the commercial entity employs, or directly is itself, a primary maintainer of the open source proj
by AlexB138 8y ago
The only time I have an issue with this sort of setup is when the commercial entity employs, or directly is itself, a primary maintainer of the open source project (not sure how that works for Confluent and Kafka). It creates an incentive structure that is counter to the community at large. e.g. a PR is issued to the open source project that makes a piece of the commercial product irrelevant. For the community that's good, for the maintainer it threatens their livelihood.
Some of these projects wouldn't exist without commercial support, so it's not a clear cut issue, but I get why people are bothered by it.
- mindcrime 8y agoa primary maintainer of the open source project (not sure how that works for Confluent and Kafka). In theory Apache projects are supposed to exist in such a way that one vendor doesn't dominate all the decision making and development. In reality, it's not uncommon for a given vendor to have outsized influence on a given project. See: Ambari and Hortonworks, for example. I don't follow Kafka development super closely, but I believe Confluent do have significant influence, but I'm not sure if it's to an extent that could be considered dangerous or not.
- PeterCorless 8y agoIt is also far more dependent on personality of project leadership and contributors than pure % of code committed. Jay is well-regarded as a 'good guy' and has the interest of the technology at heart. Such personalities in leadership can change a project greatly though. A bad project leader may lose a great deal of public goodwill in an open source project. That is a key intangible that many do not take into account -- trustworthiness of leadership.