Spare a thought for poor Landoop (https://www.landoop.com/), not AWS. They built up their business around Confluent's open-source tools - like the schema registry, ksql, kafka streams. I guess they will have to fork from the latest version and try and develop competing versions of Confluent's tools now. Maybe they could bootstrap a community effort around this?
Marios from Lenses.io ( landoop ) here. On a brief look, although IANAL, the new license doesn't affect us directly. Our core product has native Kafka and Kubernetes SQL capabilities which aren't based on Confluent's KSQL. Lenses does integrate with open source schema registries —Confluent's and HortonWork's— and this integration is also not affected by the licensing change.
On a personal opinion (I don't represent my employer), the new license affects both behemoths like AWS and smaller providers like Aiven alike. It may be a bargaining chip for the business, a trojan horse or it may backfire; only time will tell. I think many HNers know first-hand how hard it is to balance business and open source. It is a sign of health that the community is concerned and the best way to ensure an open platform going forward imo.
The summary is that we're committed to open source software and this change won't affect our users. We'll follow-up with a more details about our plans in early January.
This is Jay, the CEO of Confluent. No, actually quite the opposite. We took pains to ensure that the license was written so that software products like Landoop were free to embed our open source and compete with us in that way. This FAQ covers the competition in more detail: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq
I am no expert on this, but based on Bryan's analysis, if Landoop were to release a SAAS offering of their product, they would be in breach of the license. As Landoop are pushing Kafka on Kubernetes, I assume that is their strategy - to have a SAAS offering at some stage (we are all going to the cloud, i thought?).
