First - you decide to build your data platforms with apache kafka. makes sense as it's a very widely used, durable message bus that does the job well. Then...y

First - you decide to build your data platforms with apache kafka. makes sense as it's a very widely used, durable message bus that does the job well. Then...you decide to attend a kafka developer conference like Kafka Summit to sharpen your skills and learn best practices. At that conference, you see the CEO of Confluent give a keynote speech about how Kafka is a transaction store; you 'turn your database inside out', run SQL queries on it, even run your BI dashboards on top of it! They make it seem like this is a best practice that all the smartest engineers are doing, so you better do it as well. At that point you're investing in a path that will make Confluent millions in revenue trying to consult you on implementing their experimental, up-sell architecture on top of Kafka. Maybe their sales rep will suggest you to buy a $100k/month subscription to Confluent Cloud to really patch up any holes and make it easier to maintain. Moral of the story is doing your best to separate out the business and the tech side of open source. Behind many open source projects, there's a company trying to make money on an 'enterprise' version. Ethically, I prefer data companies like Snowflake that are at least transparent about trying to make money off their product. Rather than companies that use open source as a ladder to drive adoption, then try to bait-and-switch you into the same 7-figure deals with software that is more brittle and still requires you to develop your own solutions with it.