reducks

Absolutely, we picked the path-of-least-resistance license for the initial release in order to get the code into the open, but we'll continuously evaluate and see whether switching to a license like BSL makes sense. It's been awesome to see the evolution of licenses in just the past few years, and there are a lot more options than when I started this project. Hoping that having the project public will enable us to build a community and gain continuous feedback that will help drive technical, licensing, and other decisions in the future.

IANAL but the license (CCL) is quite permissive except for the one use case of building a competing SaaS offering to Confluent [1]; the same type of license most cloud providers are using these days. But source available is definitely a valid term as well. I really do hope people will use this code!

[1]: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license-faq/

Thanks! We've been shipping the CLI since early 2019 but had a few blockers along the way (alluded to in the blog post). We built the CLI on top of a lot of internal dependencies that were never going to be open-sourced, so we had to do a lot of creation and migration in order to have the CLI only rely on public dependencies (and in other cases, we went through the approval chain to release certain packages like `go-editor` and `go-ps1` into the open). Once we did that, once we cleaned up the codebase, and once we successfully pitched the business case for open-sourcing the tool, we were finally able to flip the switch. It's a small team so there was also always a prioritization question of working on open-sourcing vs. adding new features.

Excited for `snow` as well! ;)

I've worked on building Confluent's CLI for the last 4 years, and after a year of technical work, security reviews, and sign-off meetings, I'm excited to share that the whole project (including all dependencies) is now open-source! https://github.com/confluentinc/cli

The CLI is optimized to work with Confluent's on-prem or cloud managed Kafka offerings, but the end goal is to have this be an amazing CLI experience for vanilla Apache Kafka as well. Regardless, there are some interesting bits in the repo (like doing SSO login from a Go terminal app, or mocking API servers for integration tests) that could be useful for other devs out there.

Happy to answer questions on Go, CLIs, Kafka, or how to convince big companies to open source their software. I'm really proud to share all the work with the community and to know that the code will be preserved. Cheers!