Re:License Changes for Confluent Platform
by PeterCorless on Friday December 14, 2018 @11:18PM
(#18687009)
It 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.
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.