I think it depends whether you consider me making a model in my head of how things are supposed to fit together a "derivative work," which I don't. The codebase

I think it depends whether you consider me making a model in my head of how things are supposed to fit together a "derivative work," which I don't. The codebases are vastly different, and it's clear in certain places that kafka-python has taken inspiration from librdkafka (2-clause BSD license), and that both have similarly taken inspiration from the Java client (Apache 2), which makes complete sense to me since the docs are insufficient for building a client, as I mentioned in my OP.