If You Care About Freedom, Don't Follow IBM Red Hat (Like Microsoft Novell 20 Years Ago)
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IBM Red Hat has been absorbing all sorts of stacks or portions thereof. IBM wants vendor lock-in (which would happen by imposing Wayland on everything and shunning BSDs, not even giving them access to X11 and its forks). Having witnessed what IBM did to Red Hat's main product (RHEL) 4-5 years after the acquisition, it would be misguided to assume Kafka will eventually get any freer or even stay free. Quoting last month's report:
Other than Confluent, LinkedIn is by far the biggest contributing organisation, and most of the developers who helped build Kafka at that now-Microsoft-owned company joined Confluent, Kozlovski found.Kozlovski is among those who worries about what happens now.
"Maybe they divert all of that effort into proprietary tech and starve the OSS off," he said of Confluent's dominance of Kafka commits before the acquisition was formally announced.
"It's not an exciting acquisition in any case. It's probably one of the saddest ways to end Confluent's journey."
IBM Red Hat and Microsoft don't seem to compete. That's a problem. █
